MBR - What is it? Why, upon restore, does TrueImage offer to restore MBR as well?

Short answer is in case the disk doesn't have one. It normally isn't required if restoring to a disk that is already booting in the PC since the MBR is there. Sometimes MBRs might get corrupted or could have a virus. Some people have complex multi-boot disks with multiple partitions or some other special features embedded. Being able to backup and restore a complicated MBR without having to recreate it is a good thing.

MBR - Master Boot Record. General concept: Few bytes of code at the beginning of a HD which is read by the BIOS boot routine. It finds out where the bootable partition is located on the disk and then transfers control to it to load the OS into memory. The word boot comes from bootstrap and the phrase "pull yourself up by your bootstraps". In the PC case a little bit of code is read in and it allows more code to be read in which allows more to be read in and the system thus gets loaded. This was a lot more obvious in old, non-PC, computers. I recall toggling in bootstrap loaders into memory via a switch register - and you sure wanted it to be as little as possible to get the machine to start doing the work.

Seekforever wrote:

Short answer is in case the disk doesn't have one. It normally isn't required if restoring to a disk that is already booting in the PC since the MBR is there. Sometimes MBRs might get corrupted or could have a virus. Some people have complex multi-boot disks with multiple partitions or some other special features embedded. Being able to backup and restore a complicated MBR without having to recreate it is a good thing.

MBR - Master Boot Record. General concept: Few bytes of code at the beginning of a HD which is read by the BIOS boot routine. It finds out where the bootable partition is located on the disk and then transfers control to it to load the OS into memory. The word boot comes from bootstrap and the phrase "pull yourself up by your bootstraps". In the PC case a little bit of code is read in and it allows more code to be read in which allows more to be read in and the system thus gets loaded. This was a lot more obvious in old, non-PC, computers. I recall toggling in bootstrap loaders into memory via a switch register - and you sure wanted it to be as little as possible to get the machine to start doing the work.

I just realised that I never thanked you for your reply. Thank you vey much.

My policy, when restoring C: using an image, will therefore be never to select to restore the MBR unless I am having problems booting up.