Boot sector damage - a question

A customer's hard drive has (XPHome-SP2) has developed boot problems, and now sits with a black screen and a blinking cursor.

Windows WILL run with aid of a boot floppy, (made with an excellent little prog called FIXNTLDR.EXE from this site: h**p://tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm)

However, I can't get the system to work without the floppy, so it seems to me that the MBR or the boot sector may be damaged.

I've tried using the Recovery Console to apply FIXBOOT and then FIXMBR but nothing has changed.

Obviously, I don't want to do a reinstall unless it's absolutely necessary - I'd rather fix the problem if I can, for the experience if nothing else.

The smidgeon that I know about the boot apparatus tells me that the actual coding that's responsible for the startup is only a few bytes. I'm wondering if I could prepare another (spare) drive with a boot sector, and then copy across all of the content of the original drive?

Advice would be appreciated.

NOTE: I'm not working on the original HDD - I've byte-for-byte cloned it to a spare drive. So I'm not afraid to try anything risky

 

What kind of software did you use to byte-by-byte clone?

I have met the same situation before and I used Vcom Fix-it professional 6, it worked well.

The phone number is 1.800.325.0834 or visit http://www.avanquestusa.com

 

Thanks Jason, that was a quick reply.

For cloning drives, I use either Acronis True Image or Acronis Migrate Easy. I think the latter is the best.

I've done several hundred clones with those progs and never had a glitch yet. (I must say I'm not so enthused about the imaging and recovery side of True Image )

There's a little trick to cloning - the target drive should be brand new, out of the box, and containing no data. This method is great if the source drive is a failing original or a pre-prepared template that contains Windows with a favorite configuration and a whole bunch of applications or games.

Old 4gb,5gb and 6gb drives in good shape are ideal for 'Windows-only' templates.

If the target is an older drive, all its partitions should be deleted. I use Partition Magic for this, using 'Delete and Secure Erase', which then shows the drive as being 'unallocated', which is also how a brand new drive appears.

 

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

 

FIXMBR should fix any errors in the MBR boot code.
FIXBOOT should fix any errors in the Volume Boot Record boot code.

Once booted into XP (with floppy) get into Disk Management, does it list an Active Primary Partition ? How many partitions and what type is listed ?

open BOOT.ini file and see if it is correct for XP's partition location, can compare the boot.ini file on the floppy .(copy boot.ini from floppy to hdd ?)

The original and clone hdd have the same problem ? You made a clone of the whole hdd and not just a partition ? (have never cloned a hdd)

Just to be sure {now sits with a black screen and a blinking cursor.} that is befor it tries to load into windows ?

Is the hdd NTFS or FAT32 ?

Just thinking, if it did not have an active partition you should get a bios error code.

You can try using a Win98 boot floppy and run FDISK /MBR, (it will not cause a problem with XP)

 

TopFarmer, thanks for kicking in.

There's just one partition, C. It's NTFS.

Disk Management shows it to be a Primary partition and refers to its status as 'Healthy (Boot)'. Right-clicking gets no option to make it active - this is greyed out.

Just checked an NTFS XP workshop machine that's running alongside the client's PC, and it also shows a greyed-out option to make C active. However, THAT machine lists its single C partition as 'Healthy (System)'.

No, I haven't tried using FDisk to do the /MBR. As I said, I ran FIXMBR followed by FIXBOOT through the Recovery Console with no effect. It's rather puzzling.....

Later: LOL - It's suddenly got a little more real - the original drive seems to have completely failed. So the clone's on its own...

 

I don't think it's likely to be the drive because both the original and the clone drive exhibited the same problem. And the clone drive worked fine in its previous life.

No, I'm almost certain it's a boot sector weakness that the clone picked up from the original.

 

When using a floppy to boot it will be the System drive.

FISMBR should have fix it but if not running FDISK /MBR wii give it another shot. It does not matter what boot code is in the MBR, any will work.

It is possible that one of the boot files is coruppt (not sure if FIXBOOT replaces them or not), can copy them from floppy to root of C: NTDETECT.COM ,ntldr ,boot.ini.

If the orignal hdd has failed might want to clone the clone to be sure clients data is not lost.

After the clone was made was it put into a different operation XP system, if so it could have the wrong MBR ID, it is looked at dueing the boot process. (for what use I do not know, but if wrong it can hang bootup. Have read fixdisk /mbr will remoe the ID and XP when booted will remake it).

 

If the suggestions don't work, try the Maxtor utilities (Maxblast). They have a utility to backup the MBR, remove and "update" it.

 

Mattman, I don't think the MBR is functioning properly so I dunno if the app can fix it. Also, I wonder if Maxblast will work with a Western Digital drive?

Anyway, I'll give it a go.

Cheers.