Fix the booting problem: MBR
Problem: sometimes your PC may fail to boot up ...
Solution: many inexperienced PC users often panic in such a situation and resort to the only solution available to them: reinstall the operating system! The side effects of such a solution: spending quite some time to reinstall and configure all drivers and applications; risk losing important data.
A simple solution to most boot failures often involves fixing the Master Boot Record (MBR). The MBR resides on the first sector of a Hard Drive. At power up, the system (BIOS) consults the MBR to decide which partition (operating system) should be booted up, then the control is transferred to the partition containing the actual operating system being booted up. The default MBR contains a pointer to the active partition: only one partition can be marked active on each hard drive. Installation of many operating systems does not modify the default MBR but simply flag the partition active. Some operating systems (e.g. Linux Distros) may install the bootloader (e.g. LILO or GRUB) on the MBR. If something went wrong, you may not be able to boot the Linux or any other operating systems (e.g. Windows XP) being loaded by the Linux bootloader.
To restore the default MBR, boot the system using a boot disk (either floppy or windows installation disk), run the following command:
Solution: many inexperienced PC users often panic in such a situation and resort to the only solution available to them: reinstall the operating system! The side effects of such a solution: spending quite some time to reinstall and configure all drivers and applications; risk losing important data.
A simple solution to most boot failures often involves fixing the Master Boot Record (MBR). The MBR resides on the first sector of a Hard Drive. At power up, the system (BIOS) consults the MBR to decide which partition (operating system) should be booted up, then the control is transferred to the partition containing the actual operating system being booted up. The default MBR contains a pointer to the active partition: only one partition can be marked active on each hard drive. Installation of many operating systems does not modify the default MBR but simply flag the partition active. Some operating systems (e.g. Linux Distros) may install the bootloader (e.g. LILO or GRUB) on the MBR. If something went wrong, you may not be able to boot the Linux or any other operating systems (e.g. Windows XP) being loaded by the Linux bootloader.
To restore the default MBR, boot the system using a boot disk (either floppy or windows installation disk), run the following command:
fdisk /mbrYou also need to flag the partition you want to boot active. This can be achieved with fdisk or some partition management programs (e.g. partition magic) - needs to be run from boot disk.
PS. Hiren's BootCD is a free ISO image that can be burned onto a CD. It contains many useful tools (including fdisk and partition magic) to help diagnose and fix PC problems.
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