Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with mbr

Help me save the boot record on this VM!

genial — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:22:14 -0800

FixMBR, Fixboot, FixAnything and I can't get this Parallels partition to boot up. Urgent advice needed from fellow Mefites! I have a boot camp partition that was brought into Parallels for a client. Everything was working fine. He also wanted 30GB of free space on the drive as a separate partition to install another version of OSX. After handling that (using GParted to do the live partioning) it appears it has messed up the bootloader for the Boot Camp partition.

Things I've tried:

*Boot from XP disk, go to recovery console, FixBoot and FixMBR commands
*Attempt a "Repair Restore" which does not show up after accepting the license agreement on the XP disk
*Edited the Parallels PVS file to recognize the boot camp drive on disk0s3
*Boot from GParted, UBCD, any other live disks for any tool that can make this bootable again.

All the files are there, the thing just hangs when attempting to boot from the hard drive. Is there any free tool I can use quickly that will repair this? The client will be back in less than an hour and I've been racking my brain and finally turn to AskMe. Help?

Critical: How to fix MBR on Ubuntu/Vista dual-boot laptop?

meta.mark — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 16:45:22 -0800

How to I re-install, configure, or set the MBR on my laptop? I have a Sony VAIO VGN N series laptop. I recently partitioned and installed Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) successfully. Previously I had a Ubuntu/Vista dual boot using the default Ubuntu GRUB that was automatically installed during the setup. But I used EasyBCD in Vista and accidentally uninstalled the Vista Bootloader MBR. Now when I start up my computer all I get is something like "NTLDR not found Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart." In other words I have neither the Ubuntu GRUB or Vista Bootloader MBR working. How do I fix this so I can go back to dual-booting both systems? Please help!

How to detriple-ize my triple-boot system without hosing my beloved partition.

Bondrake — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:43:21 -0800

What do I need to do to go from a triple-boot Ubuntu/Vista/XP system to only an XP system without destroying XP? So I initially set my system up with Windows XP. Then I got Vista 64 bit and also wanted to play around with Ubuntu, so I installed them basically following the procedure outlined here: http://lifehacker.com/software/ubuntu/hack-attack-how-to-tripleboot-windows-xp-vista-and-ubuntu-193474.php

Now I find myself never using 64-bit Vista due to some compatibility issues with programs I frequently use and with no need for Ubuntu. I would like to erase the partitions for Vista and Ubuntu to reclaim the space and boot directly into my XP partition. I also want to avoid hosing my XP setup though.

SO my question is: if I erase the Vista and Ubuntu partitions, then boot into recovery on with my XP disk and use fixmbr will I have a properly booting system? If not, what do I need to do in addition to or in place of these steps?

easy way to restore mbr in winXP after removing linux partition?

Grod — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 17:49:52 -0800

I was using GRUB to dual boot a linux partition and a winXP partition. I set this up ages ago and recently needed to remove the linux partition. I used Partition magic because I was feeling lazy. Now when I boot I get some grub error. I can boot using a morphix liveCD and selecting "boot from first partition" or whatever it actually says. WinXP doesn't have fdisk so I can't fdisk /MBR, and I'm not familiar enough with diskpart to want to mess around. Although I feel like an idiot for asking this question, what simple and probably obvious command will restore the MBR to it's pre-grub state? Thanks.

Cannot Boot into XP or Grub

bloodniece — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 09:22:14 -0800

How do I recover Windows XP Pro boot record (MBR)? Scenario: Partitioned HD for Linux, Rebooted in XP ok, Reboot, install Linux and grub, reboot no Grub or XP. Ran XP Disc - Recovery Console (see extended explaination) Partitioned with Partition Magic HD for Linux.
Rebooted, Installed Linux (Debian) and grub.
Reboot --> no XP or Grub (no operating system found)
Rebooted with XP install disc, Ran Recovery Console
Ran these commands:
C: CD ..
C: ATTRIB –H C:\boot.ini
C:ATTRIB –S C:\boot.ini
C:ATRIB –R C:\boot.ini
C: del boot.ini
C: BOOTCFG /Rebuild
C: CHKDSK /R /F
C: FIXBOOT C: (had to do this since it tried to write a boot record to the partition I made for Linux E:, which I placed after C:)
No XP or Grub after reboot.
P.S. I even tried fixmbr to no avail.

Replacing my C drive

squidlarkin — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 19:41:54 -0800

I'm running win2k. Both my hard drives are pretty much full, and the C drive is tiny, so... I want to move all its data to a new drive, which will then be bootable like the old one. Am I dreaming? If not, how do I do it?

Help me delete the master bood record in Windows XP

soplerfo — Sat, 17 Jan 2004 19:15:29 -0800

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.