I Believe my MBR is Corrupted - No Windows CD

Greetings,

The machine is an ASUS netbook running Windows XP SP3. Last year I replaced the stock HDD with a SSD and I successfully cloned the old drive's contents to the new SSD using Clonezilla.

Everything's worked fine for months until I went to see if ASUS's onboard restore program still worked. It uses a hidden partition to restore the system to its original configuration.

So I pressed the appropriate key at startup (F9) and got a blinking cursor on a black screen. I restarted a number of times and could not get into windows or even safe-mode. Finally I decided to use Clonezilla to restore an image of the system drive I made only a few days ago. While the restore was successful, I am still unable to boot into Windows at all.

I figure the MBR was somehow altered when I attempted to run the ASUS restore. This system did not come with a windows CD, nor does it have a CD/DVD drive.

Any ideas?

Do I have any options to restore the MBR?

 

when you cloned did you use save parts or save disk choice??

read the two links below thoroughly:

http://priede.bf.lu.lv/ftp/pub/Utilities/CloneZilla/CloneZilla FAQ.html

http://netport.org/?p=140

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http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1139162

this thread is saying fixboot and fixmbr have to be run together

but these have to be run from the recovery console, the recovery console can be placed on a bootable usb flash drive, but I am not sure how it would recognize your drive I will include the instructions for the RC and in the next post following (to long for one) will include how to change the Bios for RC to recognize the drive:

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/tp/recovery_console_commands.01.htm


Download the Recovery console ISO here:

https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=6a7e789cab1d6f39&id=6A7E789CAB1D6F39!311

(courtesy of Jose Ibarra)

Scroll down to the bottom of page and download the file xp_rec_con.ISO

Save it to your desktop



Download RUFUS 1.20 from here (read some stuff on the page so you can know more about it):

http://rufus.akeo.ie/

I will caution you to be careful that you don't accidentally format any of your hard drives - be sure your USB stick is in and know what the drive letter is! This part always makes me a little nervous, so be careful.

Launch RUFUS and all the defaults should be okay, for the Device, choose your USB drive letter, Quick format, FAT32, label it if you want to and in the Format options box, click the little icon that looks like a CD and a window will open. Navigate that dialogue to point to the folder that contains the Recovery Console ISO that you unzipped earlier and the box should change to say ISO image .

Double check you have the right Device selected in the top (NOT you HDD) Click Start, acknowledge the warning and let it finish (it will take a little while) as it copies the files.

When RUFUS is done, it will say 'DONE' in the bottom.



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reply no. 2: the list I have is for the rec con to recognize sata drives, I do not have one for ssd drives, but will include anyway in case it helps and you should consider going here to sourceforge's Clonezilla forum

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Note disregard where it says CD in the following just substitute boot device

If your system has SATA drives (Courtesy of Jose Ibarra)

If your system of unspecified make and model has SATA drives, the Recovery Console CD (or even genuine bootable XP media) will not be able to "see" the HDD unless you first get into your system BIOS by pressing whatever key you need to press to do so, and temporarily change the HDD interface mode to something the XP startup process does recognize.

Then you do what you need to do (run chkdsk /r), then change the BIOS back to the original settings when you are done.

Here are some general purpose instructions that should get you going:

If you are seeing a message(s) like this:

Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer.

Make sure any hard disk drives are powered on and properly connected to your computer, and that any disk-related hardware configuration is
correct. This many involve running a manufacturer-supplied diagnostic or setup program.

Setup cannot continue. To quit Setup, press F3.

When you see a message like this, obviously XP Setup is starting to load, but then when Setup needs to go out and find your hard disk it is not finding the hard disk. It doesn't necessarily mean your hard disk is defective and if it was working before, it is most likely still plugged in. It just means the XP Setup is not able to find it.

It sounds like you need to enter the BIOS on your system by pressing the "Del", F2, F10 or F12 key (whatever key is right for your system), locate the section where the hard disks types and hard disk interfaces are configured and temporarily change the setting so the XP Setup is able to find the hard disk.

Where to find the adjustment and how to change it depends on your system manufacturer and BIOS version so you may end up having to just look around for it. If you know your system make and model, we can probably help you find a manual.

You need to locate and change the interface mode for your primary hard disk in the BIOS so that when the XP Setup loads, it will be able to locate the hard disk.

Before making any adjustments, you should make a note of what the current BIOS settings are so you can change them back when you are finished.

The adjustment varies so here are some examples I have accumulated:

The adjustment is made in the BIOS and could be under Integrated Peripherals, SATA Device Configuration, SATA Mode.

Make a note of what the current settings are before making any changes so you can change them back if things get worse.

After you make the changes, save them and see how things look now.

If you find the mode is set to RAID/SATA mode, change the mode to IDE.

If you find the mode is set to SATA, change the mode to IDE.

If you find the mode is set to SATA, disable SATA mode.

If you find the mode is set to AHCI, change the mode to ATA.

If you find the mode is set to AHCI Emulation Mode, change the mode to IDE Emulation.

If you find the mode is set to SATA, disable SATA mode and/or change the mode to ATA.

If you find the mode is set to SATA Native Mode, disable SATA Native Mode.

If you find the mode is set to RAID/Autodetect AHCI, change the mode to Combination.

If you find the mode is set to RAID Auto/AHCI, change it to RAID Auto/ATA

The WWW says this works on some Dells: "I had to set my SATA Operation to ATA instead of AHCI"

After making the adjustments, ACCEPT and SAVE the changes, and restart the system and see if it will now boot on the Recovery Console CD.

Here are some additional ideas about changing the BIOS to recognize the SATA drive to boot from CD:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/commo...install-unable-to-detect-sata-harddisk-drive/

 

Hi, I really appreciate the thoughtful and thorough response.

rufus failed to recognize xp_rec_con.iso - stating "this version of rufus only supports bootable isos based on 'bootmgr/winpe' or 'isolinux'. This iso image doesn't appear to use either..."

I used unetbootin apparently with success, and it booted in the damaged machine, but only to display "/ubnkern initrd=/ubninit" indicating an issue - and win recovery was not booted.

 

Also, to answer your first question: The clone I attempted yesterday was image to partition. I do not have a backup image of the entire drive, just the system part.

 

Fixed

I booted into Puppy Linux via USB and corrected the MBR via these instructions found by searching "How to fix Windows XP MBR without CD" (steviewwrites link).

This did not fix the problem, so I removed the hard drive from the netbook (not the easiest task), and connected it to my desktop using an external enclosure. Looking at the drive on my desktop, I was able to simply mark the C drive as active, reinstall in netbook, and now it works.

 

Well, glad your issue is resolved, do you now have a recovery partition??

 

I have the one from ASUS that was cloned from the OEM hdd if that's what you mean. But that appears to be non-working as attempting to run it caused this issue.

 

You might want to check with clonezilla forums for this, because without a recovery partition, or an installation cd, you would not be able to reinstall windows if needed.

there is probably a setting that you bypassed that will correct the issue on your next clone attempt

 

Check with clonezilla forums regarding using the ASUS OEM restore partition? Clonezilla seems to work fine as backup insurance, but it does not interact with the ASUS partition. Sorry, perhaps I'm not understanding you.

 

if you clone a disk entirely, then the recovery partition should work on the cloned disk

Since yours does not, there must be a setting to enable clonezilla to correctly image the recovery partition so that it will work properly

This is what you should ask in their forum.

I misunderstood you in that you are just backing up??

I thought you had cloned your system to the ssd and were using that instead of the original harddrive in you pc.

Since to use the recovery partition on the ssd drive does not work apparently.

 

Gotcha. I no longer have the OEM hdd, so I'm stuck with what I've got; no way to revert to OEM WIndows (which is not all that big of a deal I guess, as long as I have functional backup images). In any case I appreciate your suggestions.

I got into this mess testing to see if the OEM recovery still worked, which I should have done before nuking the OEM hdd.

 

Okey, dokey