How to restore XP boot block?

[Raycaster]

A friend of mine tried to install and extra 60G Western Digital drive in his XP machine. Bios can handle it etc, no problem.

Instead of letting xp do it for him he decided to load a EZ-boot util from Western Digital. He booted with the floppy that installed itself in the boot sectors (I guess) and XP is very unhappy.

It looks at c: and see's the NTFS partition and expects a FAT32 instead. It then demands to boot from floppy. There doesn't appear to be a way to uninstall this util.

The machine will boot if I set the bios to boot from cd with the XP cd in. But this is a hassle.

Question: Is there a simple way to restore the boot sectors?

I was very confused trying the xp emergency console.
Do I have to re-install XP again?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Tinker]

Hello and welcome to NTFS.......

What I have had to do is use Kill Disk to wipe the HDD clean and start over. If the 60 Gig is an extra drive and has no files that are needed stored on it then I would disconnect the C: that has the O.S. and set the 60 Gig to master and use Kill Disk to erase the drive. When I have done this on Western Digital and Maxtor drives and it works great. After using Kill Disk reboot the system with the Western Digital manufactures set up disk and proceed...........

Good luck...

:happy:

 

[Raycaster]

Thank you the quick reply.

If there is no easy solution I will go that way.

I would of switched the new drive to the main C: but the old drive is a 40G 7200RPM so the speed difference would be small. The guy has so much junk installed that I really would just like that partition back if possible.

Would a util like Drive Copy ignore the junk on the boot sectors when copying the drive? If so, I would just try that. I could copy the drive to the new drive and boot from that and format the older one asap.

hmmm.

 

[Rootz]

Recovery Console is not so user friendly but it can fix your problem.
FIXMBR command should restore the original boot sector.

 

[Raycaster]

Thank you for the reply.

Before I go ahead, does the fixmbr or fixboot leave everything else alone and let me boot from that drive without data loss?

 

[Rootz]

There's a remote chance that FIXMBR resets the affected disks to a blank clean state but it never happened to me and I have fixed thousands of damaged master boot records.