reads the stage-1 MBR bootloader to discover the location of the stage-2 bootloader. dumps the first 512 bytes of the secondary bootloader to the screen (filtered through hexdump -C)

gistfile1.txt

dd if=/dev/sda \
   of=/dev/stdout \
   bs=512 \
   skip=$( \
      dc -e " 16i $( \
         dd if=/dev/sda \
            of=/dev/stdout \
            bs=512 \
            count=1 2> /dev/null \
            | hexdump -C \
            | awk '/^00000040/ {print $9,$8,$7,$6}' \
            | tr -d ' ' \
            | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]' \
          ) \
      p") \
   count=1 \
| hexdump -C