AB's Useful Box - Hard Disk Master Boot Record ( mbr ) rescue

Have come across this problem on a number of occasions now, where the Master Boot Record or "mbr" of a hard disk has become corrupted, which results in the system unable to be booted and can not be corrected using the standard Windows "fdisk" utility.

The problem has mainly been found in relation to Windows based operating systems, especially after failed installs of WinXP, Win2K and some times WinNT. After the installation completes, the computer is rebooted, however it stops booting with a message to the effect master boot record missing or erroneous.

Booting from CD or Floppy disk, then using the fdisk utility, it is possible to view the mbr, but unable to be modified. This would appear to be the case when using everything from Win98, WinNT, Win2K and WinXP, all of which understand the existence of the NTFS format, used by WinXP.

Knowing this small fact, that none of the NTFS aware Windows versions were able to modify the corrupted mbr, lead to a possible solution, use a version of O/S that was not NTFS aware, like MS-DOS 6.22 for example.

Sure enough it works, find a floppy boot disk of MS-DOS 6.22, that also has a couple of dos utilities on it, like, fdisk and format. The MS-DOS 6.22's version of fdisk show every thing in black and white, it is either DOS or Non-DOS, delete all partitions, create one new partition, format and your ready to start the WinXP or Win2K installation a fresh.

There is a good website at http://www.bootdisk.com that you can obtain a boot image from, support them if it get you out of a hole.