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fdisk /mbr

olds

olds

Elite Member
When running fdisk /mbr should I get a set of options like regular fdisk? My machine is having major problems and I had to delete my XP partition and I am trying to keep the 98SE partition. When I ran fdisk /mbr all it did was take me back to the prompt. I was expecting to be able to make some choices. Now my machine reboots over and over and if it does start gives me
"Boot Disk Failure Insert Sytsem...." It all started when I found I had a trojan and or sub seven. It has been deleted. I checked PS and it is OK. Pulled CPU/HSF cleaned and reapplied new Artic Silver. Cleaned all contacts on all cards and checked all connections and tried the RAM in different slots and one stick at a time. Booted with just a HDD, floppy, RAM and videocard. It has been running fine.
AMD 1.33 @ 1.33, Gigabyte GA7DXR, 512 MB PC2100, Enermax EG651P-V(E), Elsa Gladiac, Glaciator HSF.
 
All "fdisk /mbr" does is erase the master boot record of the drive - it should just return a prompt. Just do "fdisk" if you want to setup or edit partitions. Depending on what boot manager you were using, erasing the MBR would account for the error message you get. If you are going to reinstall XP, just edit the partitions when you boot off the CD to install.
 
That's all it did. It didn't delete the MBR though. I still get the option of booting to Win or XP. I fdisked to remove the XP drive and it is still there. I used Partition Magic to remove the XP drive, it's still there.
 
Hmm. What boot manager are you using? Some of them (including the Windows one I think) don't put the boot loader of the MBR but on the first sector of the hard drive instead. When you say it's still there, do you mean the option in the boot menu or the partition itself?
 
What boot manager are you using? I am using whichever boot loader that comes with Win 98SE.
When you say it's still there, do you mean the option in the boot menu or the partition itself? Both are still there.
Thanks for the help. I am thinking seroiusly about formatting the hdd.
 
The nice thing about formatting is it will almost always fix anything. I would try reinstalling XP once before I nuked the whole drive. You should be able to reinstall it in the same place it was, and as long as you don't delete the 98 partition you won't lose that data. Once you install it, you can use its boot loader and set it up so you can boot back into 98.
 
Really appreciate the help. I said %&*# and started a format. I was waitng to make the switch between 98 and XP. I had a few driver and gamer issues but at this point I think a format and clean install of XP is in order. Thaks again.
 
This is a little late but maybe it will help explain what your were experiencing. First, "fdisk /mbr" will attempt to rebuild the master boot record by looking at the primary partition and determining what version of Windows you are running. To keep this simple I will assume that you already had Win98SE installed on the C drive/partition and you installed WinXP on a different partition (let's say D). During the WinXP install it will see the Win98SE partition and create several boot files (e.g. boot.ini) on the C drive. When you would boot up it asked whether you wanted to boot into Win98SE or WinXP because it was running the bootloader program on your C drive using the boot.ini file to tell it what OSs and where they were . When you deleted the WinXP partition it kept the WinXP entry in the boot.ini file so you saw it during boot up but could not boot into it because it was gone. You should have been able to boot up into Win98SE though. All you really needed to do after you deleted the D partition was to run WinXP setup again. It would have allowed you to select the freed up space from the D partition to reinstall WinXP and everything should have been back to normal.
 
Thanks for the explanation. Your assumptions were correct. What is the correct way to delete an OS when dual booting? For example 98 and XP.
 
Do you mean to delete it from the list of os's you can select? The edit the boot.ini file on the C: drive and remove the information pertaining to that entry. If you mean actually remove the OS, then deltree works really well 🙂 Or just formatting the drive.
 
I ment removing the OS itself. I formatted the drive but it was still listed in the boot order. That was why I ran fdisk /mbr. But that brings up another question. When I booted it gave me the option of XP or 98. I wanted 98 to be the primary OS so I edited the boot.ini file to list 98 first but XP was always highlighted in the boot list. I wanted to be able to start the machine, walk away and have 98 running when I returned. Is this possible?
 
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