Fix MBR - Comments

Does this mean Recovery Console will refuse me if I am not using an Admin password?

EDITOR'S NOTE: If you have no password, I assume just entering a blank/null value would work.

For those with out access to the recovery console (for whatever reason) I found the free program mbrfix.exe very useful. It runs from a command prompt from within windows xp. -- http://www.sysint.no/Nedlasting/MbrFix.htm

MbrFix is pretty good for someone who doesn't have the Recovery Console. Thanks for that Adrian. For future downloaders, remember you have to go to the root site, http://www.sysint.no/ and then the "downloads" area to actually download it.

Thanks for the info...however, I got overly ambitious and tried a bunch of "stuff" on my own. I keep getting the same message...Press 1. Nothing happens. How do I know if I completely destroyed the hard drive (or if that was the problem to begin with)? I didn't get any restore disk with this Dell...and I think I wiped everything out. I did try the Windows XP disk. But, I think I put it in the wrong place and now have two copies on there (if that's possible)?

EDITOR'S NOTE: That depends on the "stuff" you tried... Worst case, you can FORMAT the disk and re-install Windows from the XP CD.

I had the same problem. I had Linux and uninstalled it and lost the MBR and couldn't boot into XP. I have a recovery disk for it but didn't know about,and haven't tried the method posted here. What I used was GAG (GRAPHICAL BOOT MANAGER) http://gag.sourceforge.net/
and it saved my butt! And it is very useful when you have more than one OS on your machine.

Be very careful with the recovery console commands FIXMBR and FIXBOOT. These commands are more likely to completely hose your system than fix it. Yes I tried and it completely screwed the partition table.
The better way to go is to boot from say an Acronis bootdisk (or whatever backup software you are using) and then restore a backup (you made a backup right?) ,then use a partition manager to hopefully fix the partition table. If the partition table is bad you will not be able to reinstall from the WinBlows CD. I tried that as well. Make sure you have a DOS bootdisk in order to be able to format the drive.

what if your hard disk is infected with virus, let say the STONE EMPIRE MONKEY virus? then you don't have any OS installed on your hard disk, it just was happened that it was a brand new hard disk which is sucked up with an infected machine. Maybe because of the BIOS is infected with unknown virus, and then u tried it to another machine and it doesn't detected by the another machine. What should I do to make it work again? When I'm trying to set it on fdisk\mbr, nothing happens, only an error occurs saying there no disk to fix? So what is the better way to get rid of this problems.. Hope someone can help me...

EDITOR'S NOTE: You can't get a virus in BIOS, so set that thought aside... I suggest you boot with the Windows Setup CD, then reformat. See http://askbobrankin.com/reformat_hard_drive_under_xp.html

Ok I have used fixmbr before to get rid of grub before, installed Ubuntu again. The problem is i boot into the recovery console and it says select drive but the thing is my laptop keyboard is broken and some of the keys don't work and one of them happens to be "1" I had to paste that one there and I don't have any spare keyboards lying around and I don't want to buy one. So is there an alternative way I tried a program called MBRFix and that did nout. Help me please..

EDITOR'S NOTE: The "1" key is kind of important. Get a cheap keyboard and plug it in the USB port.

A good friend of mine bought Vista and he let me try it out, but I disliked it very much. Anyway I ran into a lot of problems to switch back to XP, and though my hard drive works fine it has been acting strangely. I have reformatted and repartitioned my HD a number of times using the Windows XP CD, but it does not proceed the process after it deletes, formats and copies the files. It starts a countdown of 15 seconds to reboot and finish the Windows XP installation but it never does. Could it be the MBR? I have also fixboot and fixmbr in the console anumber of times.

Hi Al, try boot with Windows 98 CD, or older version of command.com. Just do fdisk after that, it should be works.