MBR Problem? Help?

[Guest]

Over the past couple of days I upgraded a system with more memory and a
different HD that I partitioned into 3 logical drives with free space left
over. Before sending it back to the owners, I wanted to create a ghost image
of the c:. My plan had been to put the image on one of the partitions and on
CD's just in case the HD died.

I must admit to being confused by Ghost 10 and like the old versions better.
To make sure that I was doing "the right thing" I got out an old HD and made
a "copy disk" from c: to the old HD that I'd inserted as slave. My plan had
been to make sure I could boot from it, or from a copy back to another disk,
then I'd know what I was doing was correct. Since I was copying from the
system disk I chose the option to "copy MBR".

Well, now I cannot boot from either drive. I've check the connections to
the MB and to the disks themselves. I briefly see the OEM logo screen and
then it goes into a long displaying the following:

"Client MAC Addr 00 08 74 B8 57 87 GUID 444521C4C-5300-1059-8052-B6C04F343231

DHCP

then

PXE - M0f Exit Brodcom PXF ROM

No boot device detetcted, install system disk and press F1 to continue"

What have I done to myself and how do I get out of it?

I used Symantec's Recovery Disk and attempted to perform a disk recovery.
It wasn't able to find any restore points in the normal places and allowed me
to browse. I wasn't able to find any restore points or anything on the "old
disk", but the new one that I had partitioned most certainly has all the
files. Window is there; the partitions are there with the data I expected,
but I just can't boot from it.

I removed the "old disk" so that now only the new disk with 3 partitions is
installed. I booted from the OEM XP Recovery disk, entered "R" for repairing
an installation, entered the admin password, then fixmbr. Nothing was stated
and I'm thinking it just went back to the prompt. Anyway, after performing
the fixmbr, and rebooting I'm still getting the same messagesabout not
finding a boot disk.

I see there is a FIXBOOT but don't want to go much further w/o assistance
from someone who knows what is going on. This will be a learning experience,
but I really didn't plan for that tonight!

Thanks!

 

[Hans-Georg Michna]

Since I was copying from the
system disk I chose the option to "copy MBR".

Well, now I cannot boot from either drive. I've check the connections to
the MB and to the disks themselves. I briefly see the OEM logo screen and
then it goes into a long displaying the following:

"Client MAC Addr 00 08 74 B8 57 87 GUID 444521C4C-5300-1059-8052-B6C04F343231

DHCP

then

PXE - M0f Exit Brodcom PXF ROM

No boot device detetcted, install system disk and press F1 to continue"

The computer is trying to boot from the network. First thing I'd
check is whether the BIOS is actually set to boot from the hard
disk first.

You could put a problem disk into a different computer and see
whether it begins to boot. A full boot of Windows will probably
not work there, but you can see whether the boot sector is
allright.

A bit of background information can be found at
http://winhlp.com/WxMove.htm . One point of particular interest
is the creation of a boot helper diskette with which you should
be able to check whether everything else besides the boot sector
is allright.

Hans-Georg

 

[Richard Urban]

If you want to boot from the hard drive you just copied "to", you have to
change the cables and jumpers on the drive so the drive is the primary
master drive. You can not boot from the 2nd drive while it is connected as a
slave unit.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User

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!

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Both points are untrue.

1) All that is necessary for the destination drive to boot
is for the destination drive to at the head of the
BIOS's hard drive boot order, and that the destination
partition be marked "active".

To put the destination HD at the head of the HD boot
order, enter the BIOS at startup time and manually
change the boot order. Directions will be in the user's
manual.

To mark the destination parition "active" (if there are
more than one partition on the destination HD), use
Disk Manager (rt-clk MyComputer/Manage/DiskManagement).
Rt-clk the graphic of the destination partition and if
"Mark Partition as Active" isn't grayed out, click on it.

2) One can *certainly* boot from a Slave HD. Master/Slave
settings have no meaning at all to the boot loader. All that
is necessary is that the booting HD be at the head of the
BIOS's HD boot order. That can be done in either of two
ways:

a) Enter the BIOS at startup time and manually put the
the HD at the head of the HD boot order.

b) Remove the Master HD, and the Slave HD will
automatically move to the head of the HD boot order.

No diddling with the jumpers is necessary in either
case.

(MVPs: Please test these statement yourselves so as to
stop propagating popular myths.)

Use the usual precautions when booting a WinNT/2K/XP
clone for the 1st time:

Don't let the new clone OS see its "parent" when it
starts up for the 1st time. The easiest way to do this
is to remove the source HD before booting the clone.
Thereafter, you can reconnect the HDs (jumpered
however you wish) and the clone can be booted with
the "parent" OS present - which will be seen by the
clone as just another Local Disk having its own file
structure, and files can be dragged 'n dropped
between the tw HDs' file structures just as between
partitions on the same HD.

If the clone OS is *not* on the HD at the head of the
BIOS's HD boot order, it can still be started if the
the boot.ini file on the booting HD is amended to
"point" to the partition on the HD that does have the
clone OS. IOW, you can implement multi-booting by
amending the boot.ini file. But amending boot.ini and
using WinXP's built-in boot manager to multi-boot is
a topic for another thread.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Richard Urban]

The operating system is drive and partition aware. If the original operating
system was seen as the first partition on drive 0, the clone must be
presented as the same when it boots. You do this by changing the drive cable
and jumper positions.


--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User

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!

 

[Timothy Daniels]

The operating system is not jumper-aware, and neither is it
cable-position aware. All it knows is that what partition it was
loaded from and that there are other partitions in the system
associated with various HDs. To understand how an OS is
selected and loaded, you have to know the boot sequence:

The BIOS checks the HD that is at the head of its HD boot order,
and it passes control to that HD's Master Boot Record (MBR).
The code in the MBR looks for the partition marked "active",
and the MBR passes control to the Boot Sector in that partition.
The boot sector finds the boot loader, ntldr, in that partition, and
it passes control to that ntldr. ntldr reads the boot.ini file to see
where the partition is that contains the OS - which may be the
same partition or any other partition in the system (either primary
or logical), or even a partition on another HD. In the language
of boot.ini, "rdisk(0)" is the HD that is at the head of the HD boot
order - i.e. "the HD at relative position 0" - and "partition(1)"
means the 1st partition on the HD.

Obviously, which HD is at the head of the BIOS's HD boot order
determines the path that the boot process takes, and only by
*default* is that order determined by the Master/Slave settings.
That default order is:

Master on IDE channel 0, Slave on IDE channel 0,
Master on IDE channel 1, Slave on IDE channel 1,
Master on IDE channel 2, Slave on IDE channel 2, etc.

If you remove the Master on IDE channel 0, the Slave on IDE
channel 0 moves to the head of the HD boot order. Therefore,
the Slave can contain the partition which starts the loading
process.

But that is only the *default* order. At any startup, one can
change the HD boot order in the BIOS, and that order will
persist until the ROM's battery runs down. So *any* HD in the
system can be put at the head of the HD boot order, and its
MBR will direct control to its "active" partition, and the boot
files in that partition will control the loading of the OS under the
direction of its boot.ini file, and the boot.ini file can designate
any partition in the entire system to be the source of the OS.

Getting back to the "vanilla" case, that in which an OS from a
Master HD is copied to the Slave HD, all one has to do to
make the Slave boot up the clone OS is to remove the Master
HD. And one can do that by merely unplugging the Master HD,
leaving the Slave still connected. When one re-connects the
Master, it will again be at the head of the default HD boot order,
and *it* will subsequently boot. To make the clone on the Slave
be the booted OS, merely leave the Master disconnected,
or reverse the jumpering, or go into the BIOS and reverse their
positions in the HD boot order. Notice that if one uses jumpers
(and not Cable Select) to designate Master vs. Slave, one can
leave the previous Master at the end of the cable and jumpered
as Slave, and leave the previous Slave at the mid-point of the
cable and jumpered as Master. Master/Slave is only for the
IDE controller to differentiate two HDs sharing the same cable,
and beyond that, it's only to determine their relative *default*
boot order.

In short, a Slave HD can contain the "System Partition", i.e. that
partition that contains the ntldr/boot.ini/ntdetect.com files, and
any HD in the system can contain the "Boot Partition", i.e. that
partition that contains the OS. Ultimate control lies with the setting
of the BIOS, not with whether a HD is jumpered Master or Slave
or what its position on its cable is.

*TimDaniels*