Rebuilding MBR

[Tony Talmage]

How does one go about rebuilding the MBR? I have Lilo installed, and I want to get rid of it. The only information I can find on the internet is "fdisk /mbr", which doesn't do anything as any MS-DOS-bootable disk I have won't recognize my NTFS drives, and fdisk isn't included in WinXP. Also, I've tried booting with the XP CD, going into System Recovery and running a "fixmbr" command, which also didn't do anything. There has to be a relatively simple way to do this that I'm not seeing. Formatting the drive isn't an option for me, so I need a way to get rid of Lilo without data loss. Any help is appreciated.

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Tony Talmage
Web Developer
email: tony AT graphiced DOT com
Graphic Education Corporation
URL: http://www.graphiced.com
Phone: (888) 354-6600

 

[Alex Nichol]

How does one go about rebuilding the MBR? I have Lilo installed, and I want to get rid of it. The only information I can find on the internet is "fdisk /mbr", which doesn't do anything as any MS-DOS-bootable disk I have won't recognize my NTFS drives, and fdisk isn't included in WinXP.

A DOS boot and FDISK /MBR (using the fdisk on that floppy) will work.
The MBR is at the very start of a disk, and outside any partition, so
the NTFS does not come into the matter. You should also use the FDISK
to make sure that the XP partition is the one set as Active - as it
stands, the Linux one may well be

You can also use an XP CD - Set the BIOS to boot CD before Hard Disk.
Boot the XP CD and, instead of Setup, take the immediate R for Repair.
Assume any password requested is blank, and TAB over. Give
FixMBR

The Set active then needs a little more complication - in that recovery
console use
diskpart
and give the sub-commands to that
list partitions
to find the number n of the XP one
select partition n
active
exit