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Resolved Question

winxp MBR missing?

Aug 5, 2011 2:55PM PDT

I've been backing up my winxp system (a 1TB SATA drive partitioned as C,D,E,F)for quite a while now onto a USB drive using DriveImage XML. This seemed like a good idea at the time but now I'm realizing it may not have been the right tool at least for the C drive. My drive crashed yesterday and there seems to be no hope of getting anything off of it. So this is why I made all those backups, right?

I found an older 250G SATA drive lying around which I figured would be big enough since I don't really need to restore the biggest drive (F). So I replaced the failed 1TB drive with the 250G drive, booted to Qparted, partitioned it into C,D,E. Then I booted to my BartPe CD (using F6 to load the SATA driver from the floppy), started the drive image XML plugin, and restored the C,D,E drives from the USB drive. Thinking I'm way cool for my backup strategy, I reset the system and .... Nothing. Won't boot.

A bit of research leads me to the conclusion that I was an idiot after all because I did not back up the MBR. I thought maybe DriveImage XML would do that (after all it does call it an image copy).

From the command prompt (after booting to the windows XP install CD and selecting the recovery mode, or by booting to the BartPE disk) I can see that all my files on the C,D,and E drives have been restored from my backup. So drive image lets me back up all these billions of bytes, but it all seems so useless without this little 512 byte MBR piece that I forgot about.

I tried using "FixMbr" and "FixBoot" from the windows XP recovery module. It said it did its thing, however it still won't boot. Does anybody have any guesses as to why this might be?

My guess is that it puts a standard boot record on there, but I need one that can handle the SATA drive. If that's the case, is there a way to build the proper MBR?

I found a program called MKBT which I should be able to put on a USB stick and run it from there. But it needs a file called bootsect.bin. Where would I get that, and would it know how to read a SATA disk?If all this fails, would it work to restore everything to a Parallel ATA disk? I'd be willing to buy one for this purpose if it would work, but I suspect that they don't make PATA disks anymore.

Thanks in advance if you have any ideas for my on how to get my system to boot.

~Paul

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pmennen has chosen the best answer to their question. View answer

Best Answer

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So when you partitioned the drive
Aug 5, 2011 11:26PM PDT

So when you partitioned the drive, did you make sure to set one of the partitions as active or bootable?

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winxp MBR missing?
Aug 6, 2011 4:21AM PDT

> So when you partitioned the drive, did you make sure to set one of the partitions as active or bootable?

Gosh it would be sad if that was the only step I was missing, meaning I was so close to having it work before giving up on that solution. I had used qparted to do the partitioning. I looked for an option to make a partition active but I didn't see one. Perhaps the option was there and I missed it. I assumed that if there was only one primary partition, that gparted would make it active.

In any event the crises has passed. I woke up in the middle of the night with the solution. Although I had tried all of the various repair options on the windows disk (and then some) I hadn't tried reinstalling a fresh copy of winXP. This indeed worked. The computer was bootable after that. This took a long time - a complete OS install and then I had to overwrite the C drive with my DriveImage XML backup yet again, but the computer was doing most of the work, so it was not as painful as I thought.

Still, I'm thinking of switching to Acronis True Image. My reading indicates that it can backup up the MBR along with the data. Acronis is not free, but I guess there is a reason they are able to charge for this software. I was fooled by what I read about DriveImage XML which seemed like it could do the whole job. Perhaps it could be made to work, or maybe there is some other free tool to backup and restore the MBR, but Acronis is cheap enough that it may be the best solution to protecting myself from a disk crash.

Anyway, thanks Jimmy for your reply. I'd appreciate any comments others may have about my conclusion about how to protect a system from this kind of crash.

~Paul