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A few years ago I used to backup the MBR of a (now old) laptop with:

dd if=/dev/sda of=mbr_63.backup bs=512 count=63

Well, this was the first 63 sectors, a bit better than the MBR only, I think.

Will that still be valid for a more recent laptop with UEFI boot (did I spell it correctly) and Ubuntu 16.04? I am not sure if the technology has changed so that this would be useless.

PS. This backup is meant to be restored this way:

dd if=mbr_63.backup of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=63
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    All the boot files are in the ESP - efi system partition or the FAT32 with boot files. Always a good idea to back that partition up and not all backup software does that. But you can still restore UEFI boot by reinstalling grub or with Windows using its repair tools to restore booting. Often use of efibootmgr also required to add entries back into UEFI boot menu from ESP. see man efibootmgr
    – oldfred
    Jan 30, 2018 at 4:31

2 Answers 2

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If you're booting with UEFI, your disk likely uses GPT instead of MBR partitioning, so the MBR is not that useful. See this U&L post, which suggests using sgdisk command instead to backup GPT metadata.

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If and only if the MBR partitions left enough room for GPT then with gdisk you can simply convert them to GPT after the fact. Usually partitioning tools use the whole first 1MiB for GPT. Otherwise you have to redo the partitions for it to fit.

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