Learning about boot sectors and editing them?

[primuspaul]

What is a good tutorial about boot sectors and specifically about Windows 7 booting process? For example, if I have a Windows 7 partition copied, but the boot manager and all boot information was present on a different physical drive that has since been destroyed, how would I go about viewing and editing the boot sector to make the system boot again? I assume the boot sector should contain a few bytes of data pointing to some sort of preliminary Windows 7 system file present on all Windows 7 installations that then launches the rest of the OS. Is there a tutorial for this? I'd like to know what I'm doing when I backup/restore images instead of doing trial and error until something works.

 

[jumanji]

Please google "Windows 7 boot process explained" to get to know the boot process involved.

To be able to boot from another HDD, you must have imaged the complete system containing the boot sector (sector 0, which contains the MBR code and partition table), the System Reserved Partition( if your system had one) and also the system partition the C:

Most imaging software do that so that when you write the image to another HDD all the above three are put in order and content so that you can boot from the new HDD.

If you had merely copied only the System Partition - C: (omitting the boot partition that is the bootsector + System Reserved partition) it may well nigh be impossible to make that HDD boot. ( That is as far as I know )