Boot Record problems

Hello, I've been searching through the forum for a while one the subject of MBR's, but couldn't find my specific scenario.

I've been using 2 hard drives, one NTFS with Win2k on it (split into 3 partitions) and a very old one that had the boot record on it. This old hard drive just failed, leaving the Win2k drive bootless. Would using the recovery console's /fixboot or /fixmbr create the boot record (as I don't suppose it could be re-written, as it was never written in the first place?) I tried copying NTLDR, boot.ini, etc.. to the drive, but it would seem that there's more to boot record's than that.

If the recovery console won't work, would I need to re-install windows on the drive, or possibly use a 3rd party boot manager?

Thanks

-Matt

 

Fixboot can certainly write fresh copies of the needed boot files to whatever drive you want and will help -some - in fixing your problems.

If you can replace the bad drive with another one and maintain the same drive letter the bad drive had, then fixboot will quickly get you back in business by writing the boot files to the new drive.

If the drive letter of your OS load is changed, the fix will be somewhat more difficult.

One thing you can certainly try that won't make things worse for you at this point is to do a Fixboot and place the startup files on the drive with the OS loaded. If it still won't start, examine the boot.ini file to make sure it points to the correct drive. multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1) would be correct for the first partition on the first disk with an IDE controller.

 

Thanks Newt. Fixboot and changing the boot.ini setting to the one you provided did the trick (and I didn't need a second hard drive to fill the dead one's place.)