james3015

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Joined
Dec 5, 2015
My computer was installing updates and it seemed to have gotten stuck installing the final update, so I shut it down hoping that the update would succeed a second time around. Upon turning the computer back on, I got the error message "MBR error 1 Press any key to boot from floppy” and pressing a key would give "MBR error 2".

I tried running startup repair once from the install disc which failed.

Next I tried bootrec

  • /fixmbr - said it succeeded but still would not boot
  • /fixboot - said no elements were found
  • /scanos - said no installations found
  • /rebuildbcd - also said no installations found

bootsect /nt60 - doesn't work because the drive is not being assigned a drive letter
bootsect /nt60 SYS - fails as it cannot detect a system partition

I've tried a few of the MBR tools in Hiren's boot cd

  • MbrFix
  • I think another was just mbr.exe
  • Possibly MBRWizard but I can't really remember

Running bcdedit with no arguments says something along the lines of no boot configurations found.

chkdsk also does not work because the drive is not being assigned a drive letter.

The drive does show up when looking at it in diskpart, but it shows no volumes or partitions on the drive. Disk management shows the whole drive as unallocated space.

I have tried a few partition recovery tools such as TestDisk and EaseUS Partition Recovery, neither of them found any partitions using the quick or deep scans.

Somewhere in between these attempted fixes, attempting to boot from the drive would result in a boot device not found error (even when the correct device was being booted from in the bios) instead of the MBR errors 1 and 2 I was getting before. This is it's current state in case that wasn't clear.

After attempting a few different fixes, I ran three successive startup repairs and each one failed to recreate the partition table with error code 0x490.

After some more attempted fixes startup repair said it was successful in repairing the partition table although I ran it twice and still did not boot.

There are two potential fixes I have thought of, but I have no idea if they would work or how to fully do them.

  1. I have a full disk image of the drive which is quite old and even from a previous windows install. I was wondering if it would be possible to copy the MBR from the image to the drive in hopes that it would be the same or similar enough to where it worked/could be repaired.
  2. I'm pretty sure that the drive is set up with a 100mb system partition that is followed by another partition filling up the rest of it. This is also the same layout that is in the system image I have. I was wondering if there would be a way to recreate the partition table using that information without having to reformat the drive so the data is left intact.


I think that covers most of it. If anyone has any suggestions they would be greatly appreciated.
 
In my experience, even though I use another partition manager, EaseUS should be able to see the old partitions when doing some type of partition recovery. I normally use Partition Wizard and it has a partition recovery option which has worked for me, if there are any partitions to recover.

Are you sure the drive did not fail or was damaged when it was shut down?
 
In my experience, even though I use another partition manager, EaseUS should be able to see the old partitions when doing some type of partition recovery. I normally use Partition Wizard and it has a partition recovery option which has worked for me, if there are any partitions to recover.

Are you sure the drive did not fail or was damaged when it was shut down?
I tried to use Partition Wizard, but I could not get their boot cd to work. Partition Wizard probably wouldn't be able to find partitions that the other tools were unable to find. I haven't been able to find a way to access the data on the drive without reformatting it so I'm not 100% sure that it still works, but it's highly unlikely that the drive failed.
 
I have seen problems with the Bootable version of Partition Wizard unless you use the Safe Mode, I believe. But if you have an MBR install and allow it to search for partitions, it will find ones that are present. If something is wrong with the drive, no telling what may happen.

Are you able to remove the drive and use it as a secondary drive on another system? Have you considered using something like Ubuntu Linux to try getting the info from the drive, which may not work if you can't see any partitions?
 
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