Retriving info from stage 1 and 2

[Alessandro MACUZ]

Hi all,

I sought the Internet and the grub mailing lists for such an answer but I couldn't find it.

I'd like to know which tool to use to extract info from the first 440 bytes in the 1st sector and then code in the following 62 sectors (speaking of a MBR-structured disk).

The idea behind is "not to trust" (don't take me wrong) the files grub.cfg, menu.lst and the likes and retrieve information from the real source.

Think of a dump of an HD that you can investigate on without the need to boot the machine or takes this as an academic exercise.

You may consider also the case where configuration files are not accessible but still early stages are (I could use dd from another OS to extract such GRUB stage and investigate on another Linux machine, etc etc)

Thanks in advance,

Alessandro