Invalid or non-standard MBR

[gene]

Help,

I don't know where to go anymore so I figured I would see
if one of the experts reading this would be able to help
me.
The short version is that I was running the program
GOBACK and it errored and said it was uninstalling
itself. Since then I have tried to reinstall it but I
haven't had any luck. I keep getting the error "goback is
unable to determine which of your hard drives is your
boot drive". This was even after I took out all hard
drives except C:.
I was told by dell and symantec that the only fix is to
reformat and reinstall everything. This particular drive
is 120G so that wasn't a very good option.
After talking with symantec I was told that goback
affects the partition table by changing the type to 44. I
changed this back to 07. They also said it affects the
MBR. I have used FIXMBR, FIXBOOT, and FDISK /MBR but
whenever I run FIXMBR again it says the master boot
record is invalid or non-standard anyway. Other than what
I've tried so far and reformatting does anyone know how
to make the MBR standard or a way of reading what is in
it.
I have the drives set up as basic drives not dynamic. I
have 2 partitions a 47M and a 111G and they have been
that way since I bought the computer.
I have updated the BIOS from A01 to A04.
Info: Dell 8250, 512m, 120G, XP.

 

[Michal Kawecki]

Help,
[...]
MBR. I have used FIXMBR, FIXBOOT, and FDISK /MBR but
whenever I run FIXMBR again it says the master boot
record is invalid or non-standard anyway. Other than what
I've tried so far and reformatting does anyone know how
to make the MBR standard or a way of reading what is in
it.

Fdisk /mbr install older master boot code in MBR, than fixmbr. So, if
you run fixmbr _after_ fdisk /mbr, it detect this different code; at
this point you can update it to never version if you want, but it's not
important, since both code work equally.