the kid fubar'd the Vista MBR

[peter]

HI,

I am just a tourist so if this is not the appropriate ng please point me
to the correct one(s).

my kid was trying to partition his Vista laptop with paragon's
"Partition Manager", ( he says PartitionMagic doesnt work with XP or
Vista), which fubar'd the MDR. What happens now is the Partition
Manager's boot screen comes up and counts down the 15 seconds it allows
for choosing which partition you want to boot from, (there is no other
OS on the disk at this time), and then reboots.

He has tried to use XP and Ubuntu to try to fix the problem with no good
result. The F12 recovery key doesnt work either. Is there any hope for
retrieving the orig Vista MBR?

"I" appreciate any help you may lend this request.

peter in CT

 

[Gary G. Little]

First, sew his hands into his hip pockets and then tie him into a chair,
preferrably in another room, so you can't hear him sniveling.

To resolve the issue you MUST have the install DVD/CD. If it's an OEM
install and all you have is a recovery disk that should work. Note, it is
the MBR, Main Boot Record, that is screwed and booting to the DVD/CD to get
into a pre-install environment is about the only way to rectify the
situation. Yes LINUX can be used, but if you ain't a LINUX geek I wouldn't
even try. Obviously the kid over-estimated his geekability.

First, follow the bouncing ball and run the Vista repair service off of the
DVD. Most likely that will d'rabuf or unfubar the MBR. If that doesn't work
then use the F8 trick to boot into the command line repair system and run
the MBR utility. I think that is the name. Been awhile since I had to do
that. HELP is your friend in that environment. Use it to get a list of
commands and then again on each command to know what you abeout to do. Worse
case, of course is that you will have to re-install the OS and consequently
ban the kid for life from the computer. If all of that does not work, then
you might pay a real geek to fix things, but truly, about all he/she/it is
going to do is install the OS.

 

[Mick Murphy]

http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/

If you don't have a proper Vista DVD(only the OEM recovery disks), download
the ISO Recovery file(about 120MBs) from the above site, and make a Bootable
disk.
It has the options that you require on it.

Read all the info at that site.

 

[peter]

peter wrote:


thanks for the info guys,
junior got it back working....

peter