MBR recovery help

[Ninety]

Hi there..

Have a machine that has windows vista home installed on it.. has been sitting for some time.. went to fire it up and I get a MBR error..

Anyone know of a free MBR repair program that I can make a bootable CD with?

Trying to load Ubuntu but it keeps hanging.. So I may have other issues as well..


Thanks

[oldsmoboat]

Are you trying to get files off it or start using it again?

Have the Vista CD?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392

[Ninety]

Thanks for the link.. I will try that. see if it helps..

I am trying to use it again.. wanted to throw ubunut on it.. but I downloaded Ultimate Boot CD Has a bunch of tools on there.. it appears that maybe the HD is bad.. as it gave me some HD errors.. Now I need to see if I can recover any of the files from it.. I'm guessing that it's going to be a problem though.

Just stuck a new HD in and Ubuntu is installing now..

[bigbearbear]

You can try using fdisk, with this command: fdisk /mbr

But if the HDD is damaged, chances are that you won't be able to fix the drive like that.

[stilly]

There is a great program called partition master and I THINK it is free and linux based, I think you might be able to locate it on a knoppix boot disk. The one time that I needed to fix my MBR in the past 2 years I used it and it worked like a champ. Good luck.

[the86d]

Try booting to Slackware CD1/DVD and trying "fdisk /dev/sda" (probably) and seeing if you see the partitions. If you do then maybe change the bootable partitions, and then change them back and re-write that out to the MBR? Just a thought.

If that doesn't work, you can always boot to a Knoppix DVD and copy all your data to another drive (Knoppix will read/write to NTFS just fine) and then start from scratch on that drive after doing some testing of the drive down-dirty-deep-write testing (after you get you data of course..).

[bluedsteel]

try to put ubuntu on flash drive n boot to it. then use gparted

[the86d]

Any drive older than 2 years I usually replace, unless it is a thrasher-box with unneeded data on it (one-trick-pony)... Most drives have like a 1 year warranty, and real OEM have a 3-5 year warranty, so after 2 years I figure I got reliable life-expectancy out of it. It's probably just me that replaces them, but I do reuse old drives in a Linux kernel-based RAID5.

Remember: Any data that you don't have in at least 2 separate places, is data that you don't care about (one unplugged, and off-line [in an ammo-can?] is best).

[stilly]

Any drive older than 2 years I usually replace, unless it is a thrasher-box with unneeded data on it (one-trick-pony)... Most drives have like a 1 year warranty, and real OEM have a 3-5 year warranty, so after 2 years I figure I got reliable life-expectancy out of it. It's probably just me that replaces them, but I do reuse old drives in a Linux kernel-based RAID5.

Remember: Any data that you don't have in at least 2 separate places, is data that you don't care about (one unplugged, and off-line [in an ammo-can?] is best).

AMEN! And I am gonna guess you mean NOT a HD sitting in an ammo can...

[the86d]

AMEN! And I am gonna guess you mean NOT a HD sitting in an ammo can...

In an anti-static bag of course... which reminds me, I gotta update my offline-backup with all the solar-flaring going on recently (and rotate an Android in it too)!