HDHacker is a stand-alone freeware application for Windows Vista and XP that allows you to backup, save, visualize, read and restore the Master Boot Record (MBR- from a physical drive), the Boot Sector (from a logical drive) or any specified sector from any disk including removable drives.

The Master Boot Record (MBR) is the information in the first sector of any hard disk or diskette that identifies how and where an operating system is located so that it can be loaded into the computer’s random access memory.

The software can be used, for example, to save and restore a particular boot manager (such as Linux GRUB, for example) before a new Windows setup (which overwrites it).

An MBR and BootSector backup can also be useful for precautionary purposes too, since sometimes viruses or other OS setup (like Linux) could overwrite or alter the MBR/Boot Sectors, making it impossible to start up the previous OS installed and access the data stored on the disk.

Click here to download HDHacker for Windows XP and Vista.