!!!! don't do this - for example only !!!!!

We'll start out by breaking GRUB (the boot loader) using the following command dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1 this will overwrite the master boot record, but leave the partition table intact.

Now we reboot the machine and we should see that the machine is completely unresponsive. This is because it has no boot loader. The boot loader normally presents us with a menu of available operating systems on the machine, we then select an OS and the boot loader loads the OS from it's partition and starts it up. With our current situation; however, we see a flashing prompt on an otherwise blank screen (the situation looks bad).