Recovery From Bad MBR (Master Boot Record)

[John Baum]

I have a 40 GB IBM Deskstar 60GXP Ultra ATA/100 hard disk drive. It
contains no data of any interest to me. I have mounted it in an ADS
Pyro IEEE 1394 box. I am having difficulty getting access to it using
a Dell Optiplex GX200 that is running under Win98 SE. Dell tells me
that the largest drive they shipped with this machine is 27.3 GB. With
the drive jumpered as 'master' I can see it with Partition Magic 8.0.
The full 39,252.6 MB is listed as 'bad.' When I attempt to format it
using PM it reports: Error #4, "Bad argument/parameter" Bad MBR,
Primary volume, 39,252.6 MB on Disk 5.

When I have the 1394 box on, I can see the disk in Device Manager as
IC35L040AVER07-7. Device Manager Properties tells me that the device
is working properly! The driver is the "standard disk driver" 4-23-99.
The Options Settings checked are Disconnect, Sync Data Transfer, and
Int 13 device. Perhaps removable should be checked? (I notice that for
a 20 GB Quantuum FireballP AS 20.5 (which is working and is
accessible) the settings are the same.

I cannot find the disk in "My Computer." The two partitions on the 20
GB 1394 drive show up as K and L. I cannot find an M. I cannot access
it in at a DOS prompt under Win98.

I understand that I can purchase a controller card that has a BIOS
which will recognize the drive. If I do this, and I disconnect all my
other HDD's and boot to DOS from a Win98 floppy, should it be possible
to do a FDISK/MBR from the DOS prompt?

I do have access to a machine running WinXP that is equipped with a
1394 interface. The BIOS in this machine will recognize a 40 GB IDE
hard disk drive. Can I use the XP CD and repair the MBR, or do I get
in trouble because I want FAT32 and XP is NTFS? Or can I format and
partition the drive into 4 logical drives, none larger than 27.3 GB,
using the WinXP machine and then install it on the Win98 SE machine,
should the system see the partitions I have created?

Thanks,

John

 

[John]

If you have Partition Magic, then you can use the RESTRMBR.EXE command on
the Partition Magic floppies from the DOS prompt.

Pull the power lead from any other hard drives that contain data first, so
you fix the correct drive.

 

[John Baum]

John,

Thanks for the prompt response. I finally found time to try your
suggestion this morning.

I made fresh floppies, pulled the power cords to my other drives (3
SCSI's inside the tower,) turned on the 1394 drive box and booted. PM
reported "Error 88 - unable to find drive."

I checked the directories of the floppies. I do not find a
RESTRMBR.EXE on either one. Disk 2 contains PQMAGIC.EXE. I assume that
the floppies automatically ask it to run (AUTOEXEC.BAT? I didn't look
at it.) Disk 1 contains MSCDEX.EXE, PARTINFO.EXE, and PTEDIT.EXE. I
ran the second and it brought up boilerplate about sharing without
modification some software. When I tried to run the third I got "Error
5005 starting PQ Engine" and the machine locked up with an A: propmt
on a colored background but no response to the keyboard.

I did try doing the boot from floppy both with the 1394 box on and off
(and turned on after the boot) with the same response.

Is there something wrong with my floppies because they do not contain
RESTRMBR.EXE? Is it a file I should find somewhere in the the PM
folder and copy to one or the other (or perhaps a third because it is
too big to fit either of the others?)

Thanks,

John

 

[John Baum]

Hello John and Other Readers,

I think I may have answered my question in part. A quick Google search
taught me that RESTRMBR.EXE is a feature of WindowsXP not PM 8.0.

In my original post I acknowledged that I have access to a machine
running XP. It is my wife's laptop in a docking station. I'm more than
a bit uncomfortable about trying to disconnect the power cable from
the laptop's master HDD (30GB). If I do not, does RESTRMBR.EXE tell me
the size of the HDD I am restoring? The question from my original post
also remains. If I plug in the 1394 box to her machine and use
RESTRMBR.EXE to repair the master boot record on the 1394 HDD, will
that disk be one I can use under Win93 (FAT32) or will it be
unaccessible because WindowsXP uses NTFS and the MBR will be one for
NTFS?

Has anyone else noticed?

When I did a search for "Bad MBR" in Google, I found a copy my post to
this newsgroup at:

http://www.howtofixcomputers.com/bb/ftopic11562.html&highlight=mbr

There was no attribution to the newsgroup. The thread seems to be
updated automatically. My concern is that I was not told about this
'borrowing' and therefore had no way to know that I should be looking
at "howtofixcomputers.com" to see if any of their members had posted
an answer to my question. I cannot participate in the thread there
without registering with them, too!

John

 

[John Baum]

Hello Community:

I will take a minute to document how I resolved my conundrum.

1) I purchased and installed an inexpensive ($30) controller card
(SYBA SD
ATA133R) and connected the drive to it.

2) I downloaded the software to create "The Ultimate Boot Disk" at:

http://www.startdisk.com/Web1/ubd/ubd.htm

3) With the utilities on the disk I had no difficulty running FDISK on
the
'sick' drive.

4) With the PM 8.0 floppies I was then able to run a high level format
on the
disk.

I tried using FDISK after booting with a Win98 Boot Disk and had no
success. Perhaps I needed a manual to get all the parameters just
right at the command line. The Ultimate Boot Disk opened a small GUI
which made the recovery process far simpler. Perhaps I did not have
all the flexibility of the command line switches, but hey, I've got
the disk back and PM and the OS now recognize all 40 GB of the HDD
mounted in a 1394 box.

John

(e-mail address removed) (John Baum) wrote in message
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