boot record not found

[overtheradar]

This is way beyond my techincal knowledge of computers.

This all started when I had to replace a mobo because I cracked the plastic casing that stores a p4 heatsink. The"boot record not found" error msg came up during the first boot with this new mobo and i didnt want to deal with it just then so I installed windows 2000 again on another logical drive (not smart i know, should have installed it on the other drive). I formatted the drive with the faulty os boot record + On top of this I used partition magic 8.0 to merge two drives into one. Well it seems like I screwed myself as I think I can diagnose the problem down to two things now:

1. The mbr is still pointing to the old os which has since been formatted and merged with the new drive that contains the new os.

2. There was 8mb of free, unpartitioned space after the merge of these two drives. Partition disk doctor says that this is the active drive and the system is booting from there.

Ive tried a few apps that handle these kinds of operation but they cost like $90 to unlock the full functionality and for that price I could just take it to a specialist to get repaired. Its a pretty dauting problem but I dont think its beyond me yet. Im using MBRtool which is not very user friendly usless youre a tech expert. I dont think there are any other freeware programs out these but I may be mistaken.

So basically all I have to do is hide the 8mb unpartitioned disk chunk with the values 0 1 1 original, sector and file, set the partition with the os installed on it to active (which should point it to the boot record for this partition and will now be allocated the 0 0 1 attributes that it needs right?) Any constructive input would be very welcome here..

cheers

otr

 

[overtheradar]

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd...tructPartitions-c.html]
quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In terms of how the disk is used, there are only two main differences between a primary and a logical partition or volume. The first is that a primary partition can be set as bootable (active) while a logical cannot. The second is that DOS assigns drive letters (C:, D: etc.) differently to primary and logical volumes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[/url]

*sigh*

Looks like im gonna be "copy *.*all" through dos all night to do a fdisk /mbr to get my stuff off and I definitely dont wanna do that.

If it is that 8mb unpartitioned space that is listed as active how can I get rid of it?

 

[TheMajor]

have u tried to set the XP partition active? make sure the first boot device in ur BIOS is the active partition

 

[overtheradar]

There's no option to do that under mbrtool. Ill keep searching for other programs (I guess you could do it manually also but it seems like way to much work). I might just copy as much of the importantt stuff as I can to the other drive and fdisk /mbr it. Anyone know of a dos frontend program that will copy files for me? As straight dos copy commands truancates the filenames.

 

[killians45]

I believe in 2000 its fixmbr and fixboot, try those.

 

[ekÆsine]

download this file http://webzoom.freewebs.com/computer-guides/test/gdisk.exe and use it under native DOS to set active partition. use a startup disk to boot your computer than swap a floppy which has gdisk.exe on it. type gdisk /? for a list of commands. I think the command is usually something like

gdisk 1 /act /p:1

that sets partition 1 on physical disk 1 active, usually drive C:, so p:2 would be D:, etc. I am assuming you are wanting to make your old OS active which was drive C:, the first primary partition.