The MBR is the first block on the physical disk and contains TWO parts: the master boot code and the partition table.  I wanted to copy the standard windows boot code in there so I would be able to boot into Windows and get back to work.  I used a linux live-CD and something like:

dd if=/MBR_backup.dat of=/dev/sda count=1 bs=512

unfrotunately this replaced the partition table with some random one I had when I made the backup as well as replacing the GRUB boot code with the Windows code.  What I should have done was:

dd if=/MBR_backup.dat of=/dev/sda count=1 bs=446

so that the copy stops short of the partition table which starts at byte 446.

So, it’s a great idea to have a MBR backup handly but remember – don’t over write the last part of the block!  That’s where the partition table is kept.

Another way to restore the master boot code is to use the fixmbr command in the Windows recovery console (an option available on the install CD).  That does the same as the above DD command and is safer but that option was not available to me – I have a 320GB disk and the XP install CD can not recognise it unless I provide an updated disk controller driver.  The older ones can’t see disks that big.

I’m glad I got that off my chest…

The way I fixed it was to use the linux live CD and fdisk to re-create the first partition, starting at cylinder 1 and with a size just a bit bigger than I knew the partition to be.  The I could boot up into Windows and am currently making a backup.  Later, perhaps I’ll even be able to figure out where first partition ends and the next starts and recover the second partition as well.

LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _WinMain@16 referenced in function ___tmainCRTStartup

I’ve had this before and so have lots of others – it’s a continual question out there on the web – this is to provide at least one answer hopefully.

I went to:

Project  Properties -> Linker -> System -> SubSystem

and set it to

Console (/SUBSYSTEM:CONSOLE)

rather than

Windows (/SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS)

That suggested to the linker that maybe the program entry point should be “main” rather than “WinMain”

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CentOS release 4.5 (Final)

Server version: Apache/1.3.37 (Unix)

You can get this error for lots of reasons (including the mod_ssl.c module not being loaded) but my problem to day was the above error spat out by:

apachectl configtest

The reason is that apachectl DOES NOT define SSL (i.e. when it’s checking the config file). Therefore the httpd.conf will ALWAYS look broken if mod_ssl.c specific directives are in it. That is unless they are bracketed with:

<IfDefine SSL> or <IfModule mod_ssl.c>

in which case what’s the point of using “apachectl configtest” to test the config file?

httpd -S

gives the same error unless you also pass -DSSL like this:

httpd -S -DSSL

Be safe: use the actual boot scripts to stop and start the server if you’re using SSL:

/etc/init.d/httpd stop

/etc/init.d/httpd startssl