repairing the master boot record..

ever get one of those viruses that killed your hdd from booting? this may save you a few $

By HG_Eliminator on December 16, 2004 10:39:12 AM from

Have you ever had to pitch a hdd after getting a nasty virus/or after wipeing the hdd because it would not boot?. I came pretty close. After dancing around, pulling my hair and useing a few rather choice words.. i decided to do some research. I found that theres many boot viruses and not all are found by anitvirus software. Some MBR or boot sector viruses can hide in empty areas of the hdd and act like damaged sectors(i found one of these sneaky lil buggers in one of my laptops). a Scandisk will see these areas as bad sectors and Block them off so their not written to by the pc's regular usage. A simple test i found is to run Scan disk if it finds Bad sectors that werent there before, it could be a boot virus in hideing.. Boot viruses arent the only culprits to trash a MBR or Master Boot Record. Some Antivirus and System Management progs can also write to the MBR. If these Programs arent uninstalled before you wipe the Hdd it may make the hdd unbootable..If after a virus attack or you wipe your hdd your hdd becomes unbootble, there is a fix. The best repair method is to restore a backup or to use a repair disk. However, if you don???t happen to have such a recovery tool, you???ll have to do things the old fashion way. You can also forget about reformatting or repartitioning the drive, as these operations don???t effect the boot sector. First thing you will need is a start up disk. If you do not have a startup disk go here ( i used the win 98SE/OEM) from the list and follow the instructions to make one. http://www.bootdisk.com/ Now, boot the damaged system from the boot floppy. When you???ve booted the system to a command prompt, enter the following command:

FDISK /MBR

This will repair the Master Boot Record and make the system bootable. i have found that this works for all OSes..once the MBR is repaired it should be ready for a fresh OS install..

+332 Karma | 7 Replies

Good article HG.
I knew this, but it's still a valuable tip.
One time I was experimenting with some various multi-boot utilities and one of them trashed my MBR... had to perform the above steps to fix it all.

im glad you liked the article Phoon. i figured if it helps a few its worth the effort

I recall that Windows XP has a repair console and one of the commands is fixmbr. I think it does the same thing.

The XP recovery console command is fixmbr.

Fixmbr Repairs the master boot record of the boot disk. The fixmbr command is only available when you are using the Recovery Console.

fixmbr [device_name]

Parameter

device_name

The device (drive) on which you want to write a new master boot record. The name can be obtained from the output of the map command. An example of a device name is:

\Device\HardDisk0.

Example

The following example writes a new master boot record to the device specified:

fixmbr \Device\HardDisk0

Notes

If you do not specify a device_name, a new master boot record will be written to the boot device, which is the drive on which your primary system is loaded.
If an invalid or nonstandard partition table signature is detected, you will be prompted whether you want to continue. If you are not having problems accessing your drives, you should not continue. Writing a new master boot record to your system partition could damage your partition tables and cause your partitions to become inaccessible.

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it's just format /mbr ( or something.. ). It will repair without the need to format. Not guaranteed but it worked for me.

great addition to the post mrtee...

Sometimes formatting the mbr or formatting a Drive is not the solution. One nice way to clear a drive completely and be sure everything is gone, is to use a Debug Script, and wipe the Drives contents completely. Nasty bugs are gone and all data is securely erased from prying or curious Eyes. http://tinyurl.com/6zugb [MSKB Article Removing Non-DOS Partitions with Debug] Aslo a simpler way to do it is here. http://tinyurl.com/v6kr [Debug Script to wipe HD]

I keep a version of this with my Travel and Fix-it Stuff, on a Bootable floppy, as an autoboot/Run Script.
Pop it in, reboot and whack-a-doo, there ya go... Drive is clean and ready to go.

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repairing the master boot record..

ever get one of those viruses that killed your hdd from booting? this may save you a few $