Master Boot Record gone, but drive intact!

[Paul Simon]

I restarted my PC the other day and it wouldn't start. After a little
investigation I found the master boot record (MBR) is gone from drive
C! I was able to attach the drive to another PC and found all the files
intact.

What is the best way to resurect this drive? Is there a way to put back
the MBR without destroying the rest of the drive?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated! Would starting with another
empty drive make bringing all my files (and programs) back to life any
easier?

Thanks... Paul

 

[Richard Urban]

If it were me, I would connect the drive as the primary single drive on IDE
1. I would disconnect all other drives. I would then boot with a Win98 setup
floppy and type fdisk /mbr, which would rebuild the MBR on the primary disk.

I would boot once into Windows to make certain everything was working as I
wanted. I would then shut down and connect any other drives I wanted in the
system.

--
Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[Paul Simon]

Thanks for the response...

Is an MBR in Win98 the same as an MBR for XP?

Are all MBRs, regardless of operating system the same?

Paul

 

[John]

I restarted my PC the other day and it wouldn't start. After a little
investigation I found the master boot record (MBR) is gone from drive
C! I was able to attach the drive to another PC and found all the files
intact.

What is the best way to resurect this drive? Is there a way to put back
the MBR without destroying the rest of the drive?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated! Would starting with another
empty drive make bringing all my files (and programs) back to life any
easier?

Thanks... Paul

At Google I asked ...

XP fixmbr

and got a whole bunch of hits. This was the first one ...

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/.../proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx?mfr=true


John

 

[Patrick Keenan]

If it were me, I would connect the drive as the primary single drive on
IDE 1. I would disconnect all other drives. I would then boot with a Win98
setup floppy and type fdisk /mbr, which would rebuild the MBR on the
primary disk.

If the drive is currently NTFS, using fdisk just might cause some other
problems.

For NTFS, you would probably be better to use the fixboot command from the
recovery console.

The drive is showing signs of misbehaving, so a good place to start might be
to remove it and back up the data to another working system before
attempting any repairs. Since the drive's already been attached to another
system for viewing, the OP knows how to do this.

HTH
-pk

 

[Richard Urban]

The master boot record has nothing to do with any operating system. It is
system agnostic. It is just a special place on the hard drive that holds a
small bit of code, used to pass off booting from the bios to the operating
system installed on the drive.

--
Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[Richard Urban]

The MBR doesn't care if the file system is fat16, fat32, NTFS, HPFS or
whatever. A Win98 setup floppy will do just fine.

--
Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[Paul Simon]

I tried using an XP disk (SP2). When I tried to extract the Recovery
Console, I got the error message that said my verison of XP was later
than the CD and it wouldn't go any further! All I can figure is that I
have updates and hot fixes that have been applied so it thinks my
version is later than what is on the disk!

So.....? Now what?