Boot Sector Problem: Another Computer Question

Factual Questions
1

We had several power outages within a few days (in one case a few hours) of each other recently.

Net result is that my computer now alleges that its boot sector is corrupt. A normal boot from hard drive “hangs” at the point where one should be logging into Windows. The computer was a gift and runs on Windows 2000 Professional; the people who gave it to me did give me recovery disks. But I cannot seem to work with them to fix the problem.

CHKDSK simply advises me that I have bad sectors. For some reason CHKDSK /F doesn’t work from the recovery disks. SCANDISK is not part of Windows 2KPro so far as I can tell, and the copy included on one of the recovery disks refuses to acknowledge that there is a C: drive that it might scan. FIXBOOT and FIXMBR are part of the Setup repair utility – but FIXBOOT advises me that I have a corrupt boot sector and it can’t write a new boot sector, and FIXMBR tells me that it fixed the MBR but that doesn’t resolve the problem.

Obviously, what I need to do is to lock off the corrupt sector and have the machine boot from a new boot sector, ideally without losing everything on the hard drive. Equally obviously, I know significantly more about training okapis to roller skate than I do about how to get the machine do to what I think I need to do with the resources I have on hand.

Advice and solutions, ideally Windows 2000 Pro specific, would be greatly appreciated.

2

I had a similar problem once and used something like this:

http://www.answersthatwork.com/Download_Area/Downrights/win2000_boot_disk.exe

It makes a boot floppy that will start Windows 2000 from the hard drive if the boot sector is corrupt. You can then run the disk tools from Windows 2000 and maybe fix your problems. As always, scan for virusses before using, YMMV, and all that good stuff.

3

Try “fdisk /mbr” to correct the Master Boot Record. That may work for you.