Help me delete the master bood record in Windows XP

January 17, 2004 7:15 PM

Does anyone know how to erase the master boot record from within Windows XP? [you're gonna love this...]

Here's the long story:

I recently bought an 80GB Samsung hard drive. My computer's kinda old and it seems the bios doesn't like the big hard drives. Samsung has downloadable software that's supposed to fix this. They call it "Samsung's Ontrack Dynamic Drive Overlay" or DDO for short. It requires you to "pin" your drive to make it 32GB instead of the full 80GB then, somehow after running this software off a boot disk, makes your system able to accept the full 80GB. But for some reason this didn't work for me, so I went out and got an IDE controller card. The "SIIG Ultra ATA/133 PCI controller" to be exact. So I installed the card and hooked up the cables and turned on the computer. When I try to boot the computer, right before it loads windows it trys to load Samsung's DDO and I get the following error:

>ERROR: Dynamic Drive Overlay not loaded.
>insert boot diskette in drive A: press spacebar when ready...

My assumption is that the DDO is looking for the drive in it's original location (ie: on the IDE chain from the motherboard). but of course, i've moved it to the IDE controller card. At this point, the DDO is unnecessary as I'm trying to use the IDE controller card.

So I did some research and apparently, in order to get rid of the DDO I need to run FDISK and clear the master boot record. This would be fine, but my main boot drive is a SCSI drive. So when I boot using a windows startup disk I'm unable to view my C drive, so running FDISK /mbr does no good.

My questions, again, is: Is there any way for me to kill the master boot record from within WinXP. Or, is there any other way around my problem? When I try to run FDISK /mbr from within Windows it gives me an error telling me I'm not allowed to do that.

posted by soplerfo to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Use fdisk off of this floppy, maybe?

It's Linux, but the FDISK that's on there should work just fine to wipe the MBR.
posted by cmonkey at 7:43 PM on January 17, 2004

If and only if you're willing to sacrifice the contents of the drive, and all other methods have failed, wave a magnet at it briefly, and then repartition and reformat.

But there should be plenty of ways to get rid of it. For low-level stuff like this I tend to just throw an old Win98 SE CD in and boot from that. But you could achieve much the same effect with a FreeDOS boot disk.
posted by majick at 8:31 PM on January 17, 2004

This is precisely the sort of nightmare I was hoping to avoid when I asked this question a few days back.

Have you tried using a tool like Partition Magic or its ilk, soplerfo? I reckon it might help (sorry I can't be more helpful).
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:33 PM on January 17, 2004

guh...

I've tried Fdisking the 80GB and that didn't seem to do much.

I think I'm at the point where I'm just going to sacrifice the SCSI drive (I've backed up the data that was there). I'll install Win2K properly on the 80GB. Thanks for your help.

Hope your situation worked out better than mine stavrosdassuperpoulet
posted by soplerfo at 8:52 PM on January 17, 2004

Probably wisest to reinstall, windows can be very persistent about disks. Note that waving magnets at your hard drive is NEVER a good idea, and can seriously fuck up the drive calibration.
posted by fvw at 9:22 PM on January 17, 2004

I don't know that this will fix your problem, however to erase a MBR- run fdisk /mbr from a dos boot disk. This will format the MBR... I don't know what other repurcussions this might cause. I had to do this once when a linux install took over one of my drives.
posted by TuxHeDoh at 9:45 PM on January 17, 2004

If all else fails, use autoclave. A zero fill should take out the mbr (if fdisk /mbr doesn't do the trick).
posted by j.edwards at 10:10 PM on January 17, 2004

you could boot into linux from cd (knoppix) and then mount the drives and poke around (or what cmonkey said).
posted by andrew cooke at 3:50 AM on January 18, 2004

guh - the resolution, if anyone's interested, was a simple BIOS update that I was unaware of. Oh, that and I returned the drive and got another new one, the one I had seemed to be permanently pinned to 32GB somehow.

It's these simple solutions that I never think of. thanks' for the help everyone!
posted by soplerfo at 3:00 PM on January 18, 2004