FIXMBR not working

[postmortemIA]

have you set first partition as active?

 

[kaborka]

Yes, the first partion, which is now the XP partition, is the active partition. XP Setup overwrote the Vista MBR codem and the XP boot sector in P1 now works.

 

[kaborka]

The saga is concluded. I finally had to wipe the disk and start from scratch. I did learn a few things in the process:

[*]Be sure to let Windows Setup initialize a disk if there's any chance you might someday use it as a boot drive. If you init a storage-only disk in Windows XP, it may not be bootable without a full wipe.
[*]Windows Vista B2 can mangle a partition table. When installed on the new box, the hdd was no longer readable when I put it back in my old system.
[*]Using Automated System Recovery to restore an ASR backup fails unless you have the exact same model of disk as on the original backup, which makes it pretty useless.
[*]I installed a fresh copy of Windows, then tried to restore a full system backup. Result = BSOD. This means Windows Backup is useless for backing up the system partition and system state.
[*]Therefore, the only reliable means of backup is to image the system partition. After getting a bootable partition on the disk that was readable in my old box, I just copied the Windows installation from the backup disk to the target disk, edited the MountedDevices key, and the restored installation booted just fine.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Originally posted by: kaborka
The saga is concluded. I finally had to wipe the disk and start from scratch. I did learn a few things in the process:

[*]Be sure to let Windows Setup initialize a disk if there's any chance you might someday use it as a boot drive. If you init a storage-only disk in Windows XP, it may not be bootable without a full wipe.
[*]Windows Vista B2 can mangle a partition table. When installed on the new box, the hdd was no longer readable when I put it back in my old system.
[*]Using Automated System Recovery to restore an ASR backup fails unless you have the exact same model of disk as on the original backup, which makes it pretty useless.
[*]I installed a fresh copy of Windows, then tried to restore a full system backup. Result = BSOD. This means Windows Backup is useless for backing up the system partition and system state.
[*]Therefore, the only reliable means of backup is to image the system partition. After getting a bootable partition on the disk that was readable in my old box, I just copied the Windows installation from the backup disk to the target disk, edited the MountedDevices key, and the restored installation booted just fine.

Wow... you went through a lot. Personally I would have popped in the latest version of the Knoppix CD and used it to check your partition table and primary partition settings... Basically just to see what it read/found.

I would have next did a "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1" from the command line to force write to the MBR with the contents of the MBR. This would force the hard drive to mark any bad sectors as bad and use one of the spare sectors on the disk to take its place. After that I would have rebooted to a dos CD and did a "fdisk /mbr" (well, in my case I would have actually used the dd command to put in a backup image of the standard windows MBR back onto the disk, but you probably don't have one of them and would need to make it from a second computer, and then get it to the broken one using ftp (built into the Knoppix CD) or a thumb drive since you don't have a floppy, but that is just me).

 

[kaborka]

Ranish Partition Manager reported errors in the partition table, even though after the Vista installation, Vista was booting OK and the other NTFS partitions were still readable. I installed XP in partition 1 after doing the Vista installation, and it booted OK, too, despite the partition errors. However, when I put the disk back in my old system, it was unreadable. PM8 reported several errors and marked the disk as "bad".

I tried using Partition Doctor 3.0 to rebuild the partition table, but unfortunately it trashed all the partitions. That's when I started fresh! This was an 18month old WD 120GB SATA drive, which had been working fine as a data-only disk in my old system. I had first installed Windows in the new box on a virgin Seagate 160GB SATA2 drive, but decided to keep that one in my old system.

 

[techmanc]

Originally posted by: kaborka
Ranish Partition Manager reported errors in the partition table, even though after the Vista installation, Vista was booting OK and the other NTFS partitions were still readable. I installed XP in partition 1 after doing the Vista installation, and it booted OK, too, despite the partition errors. However, when I put the disk back in my old system, it was unreadable. PM8 reported several errors and marked the disk as "bad".

I tried using Partition Doctor 3.0 to rebuild the partition table, but unfortunately it trashed all the partitions. That's when I started fresh! This was an 18month old WD 120GB SATA drive, which had been working fine as a data-only disk in my old system. I had first installed Windows in the new box on a virgin Seagate 160GB SATA2 drive, but decided to keep that one in my old system.

Here what I have done for stubborn WD drive with partition problems
Get the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for DOS floppy from there site and use it to do a quick low lvl format. That will be enough to get drive back to specs to use with your disk copying utility to put you saved partiton back on. If you dont have any software to make a hard drive image goto
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/ and d/l Acronis True Image 9.0 Home

 

[kaborka]

The WD was working fine in my old system, so I saw no need for a low-level fmt. It works fine in the new box once the partition table was cleared. I had hoped to preserve the data in the other partitions, but I had that backed up to my new drive, anyway.

I was thinking of trying Acronis for disk imaging -- all I have now is an old version of Drive Image. Now that I've found that ASR and Windows Backup are both useless for restoring the system partition, I'll be using imaging for all my backups.