FIXMBR not working

[kaborka]

I have a WD1200 SATA drive that was used as a second drive in my system. It was partitioned in XP, but never used as a boot drive. Now I want to use it as the boot drive in a new system. XP Setup finds the existing partitions and happily copies files into the partition where I want the new installation to reside. After it reboots, I get "Error loading operating system".

I tried booting to the recovery console and doing FIXMBR. It complains my drive has a "nonstandard MBR" and rewriting the MBR might cause data loss. I let it proceed, and it says it wrote the MBR successfully. I also ran FIXBOOT. After rebooting, I get the same error message when it tries to boot off this HD.

How can I diagnose this problem? I've used a fresh SATA disk, never partitioned, and let Setup partition it. This other disk works fine, but that's the one I want to put in my current system. How can I make the the older disk bootable if FIXMBR doesn't work?

 

[Edersonmc]

Hi, I'm Brazilian and be Learning English, I don't know if I understand your problem.

but, the correct comand is:

fdisk /mbr

I use one diskette boot for use this comand

See you!

 

[kaborka]

Thanks Edersonmc, and welcome to AT. The system has no floppy, so I can't boot to DOS. My understanding is FIXMBR should do the same thing as FDISK /MBR. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

The other detail is, I forgot I used this drive as a stand-alone to test Vista Beta 1 on my system. I'm wondering if Vista altered the MBR in some way FIXMBR cannot repair? Anyone know about this. I deleted the Vista test partition before putting the drive in the new system.

 

[RelaxTheMind]

Just umm run a repair install or a parallel install if you just need the data. Might not work as for some reason it may not see an OS. using cloning software would have done a better job as it clones the mbr as well... I think its free on most hard drive manufacture sites.

FIXMBR only works if it previously had a good working MBR that was slightly damaged... if it doesnt see it will write a new one.

I would try a "chkdsk /r" and then a repair install if that didnt work.

 

[kaborka]

Nope, the issue is a new install of XP won't boot after Setup copies the files, so a parallel or repair install won't work either.

I'm going to put a floppy in the new system and see if FDISK can fix the MBR. If that fails, I'll try installing Vista B2 to see if it can write a working MBR.

 

[RelaxTheMind]

might need to DEBUG the drive first or wipe partitions with fdisk first before installing anything on a used drive. especially with XP.

 

[Smilin]

"Error loading operating system"


This error message is generated by the MBR code itself. Your MBR is likely fine.

It will throw this error after it has attempted five times to load the boot sector from the active partition and test it for and end of sector marker (55AAh).

Either your boot sector in the partition is shot or you simply have the wrong partition set as active.

I'm betting wrong partition is set as active. Fix this and you should be good...or at least good enough to move on to the next error which would be missing ntoskrnl due to an invalid arc path in the boot.ini

 

[kaborka]

I downloaded the Ultimate Boot CD and tried the version of Free FDISK on it. FDISK reports that Partition 1 is active, which is correct. However, it reports that all partitions on the drive are "Non-DOS" and refuses to allow me to change the active partition. Oddly, it reports the filesystem type as NTFS for each of the four partitions. (I created four primary partitions in the old system, and formatted each as NTFS.)

I tried FIXBOOT from the recovery console, and it claimed it successfully rewrote the boot sector. Chkdsk reports no errors, and I can browse the filesystem from the recovery console.

I will pursue finding out why Free FDISK reports the partitions as non-DOS and disallows changing active partitions. There should be some forum support available for it.

I welcome any other ideas for diagnosing the problem.

 

[Smilin]

ok, so if partition 1 is active run a "map arc" command from recovery console and double check that it is indeed the partition you intend. (ie be sure partition 1 isn't a utility partition or something).

 

[kaborka]

MAP ARC shows the correct path to partition 1. I had already done a BOOTCFG /REBUILD and let it add another entry for that partition, with the ARC path it found for XP. I still get the error.

I'm suspicious about FDISK reporting the partitions as "Non-DOS". I will delete a partition and let Setup create a new one, to see if it shows up differently.

 

[kaborka]

Update: I used FDISK to delete one of the empty 8GB partitions on the drive and then created a new primary partition in its place, marking the new partition active. The new partition shows up in FDISK as a "Pri DOS" partition, whereas the others, created on my old XP box, still show up as "Non-DOS". I reran Setup to install a fresh copy of XP in the new partition (Partition 3). After copying the files, this time the system booted normally off the hdd and continued Setup.

So, it would appear that the nonstandard partition type setting on the hdd is the cause of the boot problem. These partitions were created in XP, so I've no idea why the partition type is set incorrectly. Makes me wish I had my old Norton DiskEdit to correct the partition table. Come to think of it, those old Norton Utilities floppies should still be around here somewhere.

 

[sourceninja]

I have been having a similar problem all day. I installed windows (single drive, single partition, SATA) on my dell GX280 computer at work. After which I patched, installed all needed apps, etc. This caused a few system reboots to get updated drivers and such. Afterwards I decided to use zenworks imaging to upload an image of my box to the server in case anything happened. Zenworks found no partitions to upload and when I rebooted I got the same error messages. A fixboot or fixmbr solved the problem until I rebooted again. I am not sure what the problem is.

 

[Smilin]

geez guys.

I would love to take a peek at these things with diskprobe to see what the hell is happening.

The entire sum of code needed to get you up to that error message is about 1/4 of a typed page. There are very few things it could be.

If someone still has a drive left in the error state could you do me a favor?

Download and run the Setup_Perf mps report from microsoft here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta...-408f-88b7-f9c79b7306c0&DisplayLang=en

It will run about 5-10 minutes the spit out a cab file. Peek in the cab file and find a file called FTDmpNT.txt

This is basically a mbr/partition table dump + walk of the disk grabbing boot sectors along the way. It will be a bit large, but go ahead and paste it in a source code blob here.
shouldn't be anything personal in the output either so no worries.

 

[kaborka]

Those report executables run under windows. If I plug the hdd of the nonbootable system into my main rig, can you tell the report which hdd to analyze?

 

[Smilin]

It will do all drives in the system, you don't have to select anything.

Again, nothing personal will show up in the output (not even volume names so your pr0n is safe )

 

[Smilin]

Here is an example (from my box - single drive, single partiton)

Items of note:
line 0x01b0 in sector zero. See the 80 in the second to last column? That is the beginning of the first partition table entry that continues on the next line and ends with the 50 09. The 80 itself signifies the active partition. The next partition table entry begins with zeros so is not active (actually there is no second partition so the next three lines will be all zeros)

The partition table indicates my partition begins at sector 63 (very typical) and the next blob of data is the 512bytes of sector 63. Note that it begins with "ntfs" in there as well as some error messages you are familiar with.

Both sectors displayed (0 and 63) end with 55 AA which is the end of sector marker.

Something of extra importance:
Note the "Error loading operating system" message imbedded in line 0x0140 of my MBR? If you see that error, your MBR is clearly intact

 

[RelaxTheMind]

As I said earlier the easiest way to fix this is to DEBUG the hard drive. no manual anything involved... with the exception of the debug code being input.

 

[sourceninja]

I came in this morning to mess with the drive again, this time the bios didn't even find the drive. I called dell for an RMA.

 

[kaborka]

Smilin: I'll plug that drive back into my main rig and run the report. It'll have three drives and 10-12 partitions, so the report might be big.

RelaxTheMind: Can you give me a link that explains what you mean by "DEBUG the hard drive" -- I don't recall seeing that command in Recovery Console.

 

[Smilin]

Go ahead and post it here. Just use the "Attach code" button when making the post. Otherwise it blows up the thread and ends up with non-aligned colums in the output.

10-12 partitions means one of two things:

1. Extended partitions - These are basically a big linked-list of pseudo partition tables pointing from one to the next. Very messy to trace down and repair but doable.
2. A dynamic disk - any partitions that exist before the conversion to dynamic will be reflected in your parition table, but anything created afterwards will be stored in the LDM database at the end of the drive. It's possible to edit the database header by hand (fix a foreign disk for instance) but editing the database by hand isn't really feasable.

You can tell if it's dynamic or basic by looking at the 5th octet in the parition table entry. 07=NTFS basic, 42=Dynamic. In my output above the 07 in the third position of line 0x01C0 indicates I'm using a basic disk.



Relaxthemind: the only purpose of a debug that I know of is to poke a memory location and trigger the drive/controller to low-level format. I'm not sure that's applicable here.

 

[kaborka]

The ftdmpnt.txt report is attached. Here's a picture of my disks as shown in Disk Management. (150KB since Yahoo won't upload a GIF!)

Disk#2 is the disk from the new system, on which Windows XP will not install. It has four primary partitions and no extended partition. IIRC, MS suggests having only one primary partition and all other partitions within the ext. partition. I haven't had problems with having multiple primary partitions before. I will try converting the big partition to an ext. partition with PM8, just to see if that helps.

 

[Smilin]

kaborka, that's a pretty clean looking disk at first glance.

I'm in a bit of a rush but I'll look further when I get some time.


If you have a copy of diskprobe (google for it) go take a look at sector 786432. You should see a blob in ther about FILE in the first few lines indicating it's an MFT. Double check that.

Also that boot sector at sector 63 looks fine but if needed you can overwrite it with the backup copy sitting at sector 16383023 ... actually as I type this that sector # doesn't look quite right.

Should be the last sector of the partition...just before the next partition in sector 16384032...hmm. I'lle have to double checkmyself and my math..I'll look more when I get a chance.

to be continued...

 

[kaborka]

Smilin: I appreciate your interest. Sounds like you enjoy a mystery. Better than playing sudoku, no? I've got another few tricks to try on it, too.

 

[Smilin]

Ok, I'm looking again and haven't lost my mind.

Your Partition table and boot sector look fine. Short of checking about half a dozen trivial things with diskprobe the disk looks basically healthy.

Just so I'm not confusing the two issues on this one thread, what are the symptoms in your case again?

 

[kaborka]

The symptoms were:

[*]After the file copy phase of Windows setup, when it tries to boot off the hdd, I get "Error loading operating system."[/list]
[*]Same result after installing the hdd into a different computer, and using that machine to copy a bootable partition to this hdd.[/list]
[*]Neither FIXMBR, FIXBOOT, or BOOTCFG /Rebuild (singly or in combination) would fix the problem[/list]

The latest news is that Windows Vista B2 did install on the disk. I installed it in a different partition that was marked active. It rebooted fine and continued its setup. And I just now tried Windows XP setup again (after using Vista to create a frexh partition for XP and making it active), and it now boots fine. Vista's Setup seems to have fixed the problem that was preventing this disk from working with XP.

I have no idea what was wrong. I had previously tried XP setup with an existing partition, or letting it create a new boot partition, and neither had worked. Vista changed something. The disk had previously been partitioned in a different XP box, but had never been used as a bootable drive.

I had previously installed XP on the new box on a new virgin SATA drive, and it installed fine. I'm currently in the process of restoring the system backup made of that disk to the used disk that had the problems.