Repair MBR of external hard drive?

[Valgard]

OK, here’s the situation. I’ve got a spare hard drive that I’m using to build a new PC. The drive worked fine at the office where I wiped it (reformatted several times).

I think that the MBR of this hard drive is now hosed and I need to repair it. I can put it in an external drive case and reformat but when I put the drive into the new PC, Windows will not install on the dratted thing.

Given that I don’t have a floppy drive handy (so can’t build a bootable floppy with FDISK) is there any way to repair the MBR of the spare hard drive? My regular PC is a W2K box. I’ve got the hard drive in a USB case so I can plug it in but W2K doesn’t seem to have any MBR repair tool

Anyone have any ideas? If this can be done from Linux I do have a bootable Knoppix CD onhand (Penguin Sleuth build, most recent copy) but I’m definitely a Linux newbie.

If the drive is just dead I can chuck it, no big loss, but now my curiousity is fired up to see if this can be fixed.

Thanks!

[Rex_Fenestrarum]

Windows will not install on the dratted thing

Jeez - could you be any more obscure? What exactly is the problem that you’re having? I have no idea of what’s going on, but have you tried copying the WIN98 or I386 folders from the install to the drive WITHIN Win2k and then installing the drive in the “new” PC?

If you’re having MBR troubles, why not attach it to the Win2k box and run a CHKDSK?

[Valgard]

@Rex Fenestrarum

Jeez - could you be any more obscure? What exactly is the problem that you’re having? I have no idea of what’s going on, but have you tried copying the WIN98 or I386 folders from the install to the drive WITHIN Win2k and then installing the drive in the “new” PC?

If you’re having MBR troubles, why not attach it to the Win2k box and run a CHKDSK?

Trying to install WinXP from CD. Install has variously seemed to:

a. Recognize that the drive is formatted and proceed with the installation, only to fail to copy a whole slew of files and thus fail.

b. Fail to recognize that the drive is formatted but allow reformatting, then fail again as in (a).

c. Allow reformatting but then fail right when it finishes formatting.

I have also tried installing Red Hat 9 just to see if the damn thing worked and maybe it was a Windows problem. RH9 chugged along it’s merry way and then failed trying to initialize the swap space on hda3 IIRC.

Perhaps I’m wrong but I don’t think that CHKDSK will repair the MBR. There’s no switch for it. It will look for bad sectors on the drive and other things like that. I did scan for errors from W2K disk management (several times) with nothing bad being reported.

[astro]

If you could temporarily install a standard or USB floppy drive your life would be easier, but here is something that might help.

MBR is damaged

If you have Windows NT / 2000 / XP, you can boot from startup floppy disks or CD-ROM, choose repair option during setup, and run Recovery Console. When you are logged on, you can run FIXMBR command to fix MBR.

Also you can use third party MBR recovery software or if you’ve created MBR backup, restore it from there (Active@ Partition Recovery has such capabilities).

[Tentacle_Monster]

1. Make sure the bad hard drive is the only one in your case.
2. Boot the Knoppix disk.
3. If you need to, mount the bad HD. I don’t know if Knoppix automatically mounts a drive or not. If you do need to, get root with “su” and use “mount -t ntfs -r /dev/hda1 /mnt”, then cd to /mnt.
4. do “fdisk /MBR”

That might work, but it’s a SWAG.

[Valgard]

@astro

If you could temporarily install a standard or USB floppy drive your life would be easier, but here is something that might help.

MBR is damaged

I was thinking about this but thought that it only worked on the drive that the OS is on. I’ll give it a shot, can’t hurt!

[astro]

@Valgard

I was thinking about this but thought that it only worked on the drive that the OS is on. I’ll give it a shot, can’t hurt!

Actually, you’re probably right about that. You might want to remove the external drive from it’s case and mount it (temporarily) as the primary.

[Valgard]

@astro

Actually, you’re probably right about that. You might want to remove the external drive from it’s case and mount it (temporarily) as the primary.

However the problem is that there is nothing on that drive so the W2K repair routines are questionable - no W2K installation for it to even recognize. But I’ll give it a shot. What I’m looking for is a standalone repair utility, something that lets me specify a particular drive and fix the MBR on it.

[astro]

@Valgard

However the problem is that there is nothing on that drive so the W2K repair routines are questionable - no W2K installation for it to even recognize. But I’ll give it a shot. What I’m looking for is a standalone repair utility, something that lets me specify a particular drive and fix the MBR on it.

I think the afresaid fix mentioned using the W2K utiltiies that are available if you auto boot off the W2K install CD without using a floppy. If you can’t auto-boot off directly off the install CD, and can’t boot off of a floppy, and don’t have a drive repair utility sophisticated enough to repair the MBR of the drive if used as an external drive or IDE cable attached secondary drive then I’m out of ideas.

[EasyPhil]

I’ve used a program called MBRTool which helped me revive a drive where the partition information got hosed for one reason or the other. It works great especially if you save the drive information before hand so that you can restore if your drive information get hosed. I didn’t save mine but was able to look at the drive information and figured out what needed to be changed.
MBR Tool

MBRtool is a DOS program designed to backup, restore and manipulate your hard disk MBR.

The MBR could easily be seen as one of the most important sectors on the disk. If anything happens to the contents of this sector, the data on your disk could be unreachable. Or the computer might simply not start anymore.

MBRtool is not an automatic recovery program but will allow users to prevent dataloss (due to MBR corruption) by backing up the MBR, and offers power users all the power they’ll ever need to ‘mess’ with their MBR.

MBRtool is freeware.

[Valgard]

@EasyPhil

I’ve used a program called MBRTool which helped me revive a drive where the partition information got hosed for one reason or the other. It works great especially if you save the drive information before hand so that you can restore if your drive information get hosed. I didn’t save mine but was able to look at the drive information and figured out what needed to be changed.
MBR Tool

That is very much the sort of thing that I was looking for, thanks EasyPhil.