I've posted about "Roadkil's Bootbuilder", a couple of times since I came across it some time ago, and both times it was in connection with a member having problems with boot corruption.
I've never had cause to use it thankfully, but it does have a feature which I've completely overlooked. Backups! The feature was under my nose on the home page, and I missed it.
It will read the boot sector of any drive, and then you can export (save) that information to file, and of course it has an "Import From File" and "Write To Disk" feature.
I've made boot sector backups of each of my drives, and the size of the backup is ridiculously small, 512bytes per file (the program is only 84kb), but it could really save some heartache if the problem you have is simply a corrupt boot sector.
I had to test this to make sure I wasn't giving you guys a dodo, so I imported the saved backup for my internal hard drive, and wrote it to disk.
And as expected, after rebooting, my internal hard drive was picked up and worked as it should. I've tried the boot sector restore twice now, and both times the drive was working as it should.
For anyone who may who need them, I've a sequence of screenshots showing how simple the backup and restore process is.
This little utility is a 43kb gem IMHO.
