How to clear boot sector from hard drive?

[NleahciM]

Hi - I've been having some trouble with getting a system to boot with a second hard drive attached. It boots just fine when it's not attached - and it just goes to a blank screen when this second hard drive is attached. I got to thinking about it - and Windows at one point was installed on this hard drive. I deleted the old windows partition already - but I wonder if there's something left behind from it? I don't really understand the whole boot sector thing or whatever...

So can anybody tell me how to do make sure that there isn't anything left on that hard drive? I have an external usb 2.0 enclosure I can put it in so that it can be formatted, partitioned, or whatever else I need to do. I also have a copy of partition magic on my computer - if that would be helpful.

Any ideas? Thanks so much!

 

[tiap]

Try and put it in your box as a boot drive and see if bios sees it and/or you can boot to dos with a win 98 boot disk. If you get that far you can use the drive manufacturer's manage disk to write zeros and /or analize it. After that you can even format in fat 32 from win 98 and then try it in your usb enclosure. The only drives that blackscreen me as secondaries are bad drives.

 

[NleahciM]

Originally posted by: tiap
Try and put it in your box as a boot drive and see if bios sees it and/or you can boot to dos with a win 98 boot disk. If you get that far you can use the drive manufacturer's manage disk to write zeros and /or analize it. After that you can even format in fat 32 from win 98 and then try it in your usb enclosure. The only drives that blackscreen me as secondaries are bad drives.

Well it's still a primary hard drive - it's on a seperate channel since it's PATA while the boot drive is SATA. The drive works perfectly fine when in the usb enclosure. I'll mess around some with booting from it.

 

[tiap]

I didn't know you were booting sata. People have been having problems with that, but I have no experience with sata yet.
Try your bios for boot options and make sure the problem drive isn't listed as a boot device.
If you don't want to boot from this drive any longer, you can probably use partition magic to change to to a logical drive. I use partion expert and it can do this.

 

[Schadenfroh]

fdisk mbr

 

[Yanagi]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
fdisk mbr

The golden oldie that never fails 🙂 Try it it'll do wonders for ya.

 

[NleahciM]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
fdisk mbr

Will that kill the partition information on the drive? I have some files already on it that I'd like to not lose. Or at least I'd like to have some warning that I'm going to lose them so that I can back them up...

 

[Goosemaster]

in the windows recovery console(boot of an xp/2k cd:


fix mbr

 

[NleahciM]

OK I opened up the drive in partition magic. \it shows three partitions. The first one doesn't have a name and is unallocated (not formatted) and is 7.8 MB in size. It's a primary partition. The next also doesn't have a name, is of type "extended", is 114463.1 MB in size, and is primary. The last partition is named "Local Disk G", is of type NTFS, is also 114461.3 MB in size, and is a logical partition. Of those three - Partition Magic will only allow me to change the Local Disk G partition (the NTFS one) to primary. The others it will not let me change.

 

[NleahciM]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
fdisk mbr

This didn't work - so I tried fdisk /mbr instead - it seemed to do something, but it didn't give me any error messages or any kind of feedback though.

The problem still persists with my computer.

Oh and I just updated the bios - and that didn't help either.

 

[Steve]

Does the drive show up as a letter in fdisk? If so, try to format it.

 

[NleahciM]

Allright well the problem has been taken care of. I just had to enable "IDE Bus Mastering" (whatever the heck that is) and it worked without any hiccups.

Now the question that I'm asking myself is "why the heck wasn't that enabled by default?!"