Help! BIOS flash lost MBR?

Mainframeguy

Debiant by way of Ubuntu
Joined
29 Aug 2002
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To my innocent mind it seems my partitions table or somesuch just got screwed by a BIOS update.... OK I did also take the updated NForce3 drivers etc from MSI.... Their LiveUpdate utility was bugging me to do it!

Anyway, below is a screen pic of what I am getting - so I know I shall have to put in the XP CD and boot from there - the question then is what is the best course of action for me? Or does anyone think I would do OK going for a DriveImage backup I have on a separate HD in there from yesterday?

Opinions or input - please....

Many thanks....
 

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I don't think any corruption has occurred on your disk.
It seems to me that after flashing your BIOS the parameters being used for your hard disk in the BIOS don't match those used when you originally installed your OS.
First thing I'd do is check the bios settings are set to Auto and LBA should probably be enabled.

Failing that, I'd make a bootable floppy disk with some drive utilities on which would enable you to check the partition table and mbr on the physical disk.

You could also confirm the disk is good by using something like Ultimate Boot CD for Windows

Boot of this cd and you'll be able to see all of your filesystem and files.
This would confirm there is actually no partition table corruption
 
presently booted into the Partition Magic (Caldera DOS) environment and debating with myself what to do.... the fact is that the disc which has gone "bad" is the SpinPoint IDE0 Master, I had that set up as D: drive and was booting from C: which is my SATA drive - and that is still there fine with partition table intact.

Only problem I have is that PM insists you can only "Set Active" partitions on the first disc - IE IDE0 Master. I have noticed this before - an basically have just avoided setting any drive to active. Right now I am thinking about wiping and reformatting the partition on that drive - hoping that will allow machien to get through to boot from the SATA drive and so on - then I just have to recover data for my D: drive....

right - going to try that....

[EDIT] B*****r!! :mad: that goes all tyhrough to confirm and apply change then PM just gives me a B***y Error #4 dialog box and fails (whatever that means!)... Off to maybe try this from the Recovery console - anyone else got any other bright ideas? [/EDIT]
 
OK - fixed now - used FIXBOOT on my second trip to the recovery console, I think that is what did it although I did also run a configmbr (I think that was the one)...

Anyway curretly booted back to XP and going to check things out like my disk integrity etc.... Hopefully AOK with updated drivers and BIOS now :eek:
 
sorry mbx - missed your post - fixed anyway, but you were right and I really must get around to generating that ultimate boot CD someday since I tried before once!
 
maybe you should turn off your network-boot-rom-thingy option, it seems to look for network boot files at startup.
 
All that’s happened here is that the BIOS update (which by the way removes all your original settings) has re-activated all the devices on the motherboard; all you need to do is to disable them and all the false positives will go away. The setting I don’t understand however is why your system is trying to boot form a network card, this always produces this error, just disable it, boot to XP and then re-enable it. There is nothing wrong with your system I suspect as arleady mooted by others.

:) :) :)
 

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Also Hi EP and people. I found this place again while looking through a oooollllllldddd backup. I have filled over 10TB and was looking at my collection of antiques. Any bids on the 500Mhz Win 95 fix?
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