Boot record constantly corrupted

[turn_pike]

I have two hard drives :
Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB
WD Caviar Green 1.5TB

For the past few months they have been having a curious problem where the boot record seem to constantly get corrupted. The symptom being instead of booting into Windows or starting GRUB the computer would simply restart.

Whenever this happen, I would start my linux live cd and install linux to a spare partition then the installer will put GRUB in MBR again. I dont reboot my computer all that often, most times I simply forget this problem exist once I am able to boot into Windows. So I have been Lately however the problem seem to become more severe, this time every single reboot corrupts my MBR. chkdsk /fix did find some problem and supposedly it managed to fix it, but the mbr problem still exists.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

I would suspect a failing hard drive. I've had two F3 1TB drives fail. Download Seagate's Disc Wizard and run the tests.

 

[Matt1970]

I agree, that is a real good indication of either a drive failure or malicious software.

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

If it were me I would do a low level format of the drive and really scrub out the MBR. Windows and linux like to throw scaps in that area and sometimes I've seen them leave residuals. I usually start with Windows command line partitioner and delete everything on the MBR. Then move to linux parted or whatever and again delete everything on the MBR. In the end if it's totally clean with no MBR you shouldn't even get a Grub message on boot, just a "no disk found". Then load linux or whatever and see if it happens again. I would also run a long WD Lifeguard scan on the disk for good measure.

If you still get the error after all of that, replace the drive.

 

[lakedude]

You could use "DD" to scrub the drive for real.

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda (or sda, or whichever is the drive you are scrubbing)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)

This should make the drive like new, software wise. (not sure if it writes to the MBR, but I think it does everything at a low level)

It will take forever BTW, like a day.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

You could use "DD" to scrub the drive for real.

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda (or sda, or whichever is the drive you are scrubbing)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)

This should make the drive like new, software wise. (not sure if it writes to the MBR, but I think it does everything at a low level)

It will take forever BTW, like a day.

I had bad clusters on my second F3, wiped the drive, and it passed all tests with flying colors. Reinstalled, went on about my merry business, and the bad clusters came back. Biggest PITA I've ever dealt with.