The EASIEST way to identify what's in the MBR or VBR is to run `ms-sys` with no other arguments than the device: % ms-sys /dev/sda1 /dev/sda1 has a FAT32 file system. /dev/sda1 has an x86 boot sector, it is exactly the kind of FAT32 DOS boot record this program would create with the switch -3 on a FAT32 partition. ======[ MBR ]====== dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 | md5sum Windows 2000/XP/2003 MBR b4045732ab94f8bda5ad56fde6d24c3b ms-sys --mbr ======[ VBR ]====== dd if=/dev/sda1 bs=512 count=1 | md5sum