Corrupt boot sector

[Newtechie]

Does anyone know of any program that I could run to see if my boot sector is
corrupt? I have a Maxtor 250 hard drive and when I restarted my computer I
got a "Disk boot failure. Insert system disk and press enter". I pressed
enter 3 times only to receive the same error. However, when I completely
shutdown the computer and rebooted the 4th time, it was fine. After
installing a program, I needed to reboot again only to come to an infinite
looping self rebooting state. Currently I'm running a diagnostic test with
PowerMax boot diskette. No results as of yet.

If it turns out that everything passed diagnostics, what should I do?

TIA,
Newtechie

 

[Admiral Q]

Don't know of a tool to check it, but you can boot to the WinXP Recovery
console on CD and at the command line type "FIXMBR" and it will overwrite
"whatever" is there with the NT BootLoader/BootStrap code. While you are
there, you might as well do a "FIXBOOT", which will create a new "BOOT.INI"
file with the correct ARC commands to boot all valid "WINDOWS" OS's found on
the system.

--
Star Fleet Admiral Q @ your service!
"Google is your Friend!"
www.google.com

***********************************************

 

[Newtechie]

Hi Admiral,

Thanks for your response. However, that didn't work. I actually tried that
after the diagnostics finished. I still got the restart loop. I booted
with the XP cd and went into the recovery console and did a c:\map. It
showed the C drive having a partition but was was strange is that it didn't
have a file system. I don't know how that was possible when I had just
finish using the computer before all of this happened. So I decided to
format the drive again which took about an hour.

Now when I go to restart and finish the installation I get an error saying
"ntldr is missing".
How do I get pass that?

Newtechie

 

[jel183\(UK\)]

Have a read of this:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;320397