Unable to write master boot record

I ran Scandisk (Defrag) on all my drives yesterday afternoon and when I rebooted I had a failure right after PM Bootmagic was executed. It said (I believe) "unable to write master boot record" (Error 8155?). I then ran Partition Magic and all of the drives (7 total - 2 IDE & 5 SCSI), came up blank, no partitions & no data. I ran Spinrite and it said I had no hard drives. All of the drives are being identified in the BIO's OK. Also, after a while, I could no longer start my computer with my C: drive connected so I disconnected it (it's my only bootable drive). I then tried to run Norton Utilities from my CD and it said I had to disable Norton "Go-Back" before I could proceed. I disabled Go-Back last night and this morning I was able to boot from my NU CD and the anti virus program ran and it was scanning all of the drives (6) and files on these drives. I then had to leave for work. I will run Partition Magic when I get home and hopefully these six drives show up being partitioned OK with all of the data on them. I will then reconnect my C: boot drive and see if is readable. Does anybody have any suggestions of what else I should look for?
I have a complete backup of my computer stored on two of the SCSI hard drive (DataKeeper), C: is stored on my X: drive and D:E:F:&G: are stored on my I: drive so eventually I should be able to recover OK. Dave

 

My OS is WinXP Home Edition. Where should I have posted it? Dave

 

Hi Dave,

Could any of the drives (the C: in particular), have a drive overlay (disk manager), it may need to be reinstalled.

Matt

 

First a disclaimer - I have never used PM so you probably ought to wait for comments from some who have.

XP offers a great way to repair a damaged MBR and it certainly sounds like yours is. From the recovery console you can run the command fixmbr and that's certainly the first thing I'd suggest to a person not using the PM boot manager.

What file system are you using, FAT32 or NTFS?

And I think when you get the system IDE drive working again, the SCSI drives may show up.

A question. Since you have lots of good options with the native boot.ini file with XP, what are the advantages of using a 3rd party boot manager? And this is strictly informational for me rather than any sort of dig at alternative boot managers.

 

As usual with Windows, nothing goes as expected. No matter what I did I could not recover my C: drive MBR, WinXP couldn't recover it and nothing else I tried could either. I was wasting too much time so I decided it would take less time to reformat my C: drive and start over, this would make me lose my E:F:G: & H: partitions also. All of my other drives were OK when checked with PM last night before I started so I knew my backups were OK. I then reinstalled WinXP on my master drive (120GB Seagate). Due to the fact I left all of my other drives connected my boot drive ended up as P:, bummer. (my Maxtor 10GB had been identified as an unbootable C: drive during the testing of my other six drives). I thought that I might be able to change the Seagate from P: to C: when finished, of course this was not to be. The reinstallation of WinXP went OK except when it ran ScanDisk on the I: drive. There is an error on this drive that caused ScanDisk to hang there forever. Also while installing WinXP, at some point it said it had to install files from the WinXP CD that was in the M: drive, I discovered that the CD was now in the K: drive! I determined which of my five CD/DVD drives was the M: drive and moved the CD to it, everything went OK after that. If I have to reinstall WinXP again I will disconnect my second drive (Maxtor) and also pull my SCSI card so I can avoid these problems. This would also make the installation of WinXP go much quicker. I now changed the drive letters on all of my drives to what they were before, now realizing that P: couldn't be changed (the CD that was on P: previously I now made C: ). I now reinstalled PM (and DataKeeper) on my D: drive and repartioned my P: drive to P:E:F:G: & H:, this went OK. I then used DataKeeper to install my backups to my P: (installed old C: to P: ) E:F: & G: drives and this is where I am right now. Dave