Goofed MBR?

Fonz_2

A few days ago I installed Ubuntu linux onto a spare pc but swiftly decided to uninstall it... but thats another story.

Anyhow - I fear my mistake may have been the over zealous attitude to deleting partitions by booting to the windows xp disc and vaping everything.

Now when I attempt to boot to the HDD even after the first stage of windows setup, I get an 'operating system not found' error. I have tried booting to the windows recovery console and attempted FIXMBR and FIXBOOT but with no success

Does anybody have any suggestions ?

fwor

You could try the open source SuperGrub Boot disk:

http://www.supergrubdisk.org/

It's primarily designed to fix problems with the GRUB bootloader, but also includes tools to remove GRUB and make Windows boot normally following the removal of a Linux distro.

unrich

I used to do this regularly but a dos disk or bootable CD with dos on and a
fdisk /mbr
soon un-goofed the mbr
This was in the FAT32 world.

not sure what the NTFS/XP version of this would be

bookduck

Another way would be to use a hex editor on the disk and copy the first few sectors from a working disk ideally of the same size/type and paste it on to the new hdd. However if I remember correctly the boot sector was similar on all disks?
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q140418/

There is one prog that copies the boot sector as part of virus backup issues.
http://www.cpqlinux.com/mbr.html
http://www.xs4all.nl/~gklein/bc.html#Q1-1-1

good luck!