Master boot disk failure

[c-hoppe]

I came home tonight to the news that the "puter won't work".
During boot up I get "master boot disk failure", "install boot disk and press enter"
Tried booting to floppy but it will not let me into the "C" drive,( says invalid drive), same with "D" , even under safe mode. Bios sees the drive but that's it. AX59pro mobo w/ AMD K6-2 300, Samsung 4.3HD Win/95b.
Where do I go from here?

[bailey]

off hand I would say that you lost the hd, if it is in the bios then it may not totaly lost, with the boot disk try to get the sys files back on the hd, then see what you get.

[Jenni]

If it won't boot, how did you get to safe mode? And is D: your CDROM, or is it another hard drive? If it is a hard drive, I would suspect a virus. If it is a CDROM, I'm not sure what the problem would be that both would give you an "invalid drive specification" message.

[kraken]

Sounds like a master boot record failure (possible virus). With the boot disk (A drive) use Fdisk /mbr to try to restore the Master Boot Record from the DOS A prompt. If that doesn't work it will probably be a case of repartitioning and reformatting.

Good thinking jenni, how to get into safe mode with a drive that won't boot. Only way I can see this happening is to boot from A drive and goto windows (on C) and type WIN. But as you can't get into C drive ????????

More info needed C-hoppe
I'm crossing my fingers on this one and its hell typing.

[Edited by kraken on 12-10-2000 at 08:29 AM]

[c-hoppe]

Jenny et all,
The D drive is the CD Rom. I was able to get to safe mode by booting to a floppy and hitting F8 during boot up.

I'll try to fdisk the mbr later today. Other wise maybe a virus is a possibility. My Virus tools are not up to date. I did try using a virus boot recovery diskette with no results, but it is a year old at least.

[Alfie]

If the cdrom is slaved off the hard drive,the cable connecting the two of them may have come loose,before fdisking,etc.
Make sure cables are secured and all is set up correctly.
As both devices have failed,this would be the place to start.

[c-hoppe]

After reading several posts I decided to try getting to a command prompt during boot up. It worked. I hit F-8 during boot and got to a menu that gave me a choice of safe mode, command prompt, step by step, etc...

At C:> I ran scandisk and found the problems. The FAT had been changed, there were many missing and corrupted files and much surface damage to drive. After about two hours with scandisk I was able to get almost everything going again by reverting to the previous registry.

The only glitch now is a message at boot up that says "there is not enough memory present to load the Windows registry or the registry is corrupted and some applications may not run correctly.

Any ideas on how to correct this?


Otherwise system runs fine after resolving some resource conflicts with the modem that cropped up at the same time as the previous mentioned problem.

Wonder if it was a virus.

[Jenni]

I would try replacing your RAM. My brother's computer just did the same type stuff to him, and he replaced the RAM and it has been fine ever since. Bad RAM can do all kinds of things. What happens is that Windows writes one thing to the RAM, and the RAM spits out something different. It doesn't take much of that before you have one humungous mess!

[bailey]

the other possibilty was that the reg might be corrupt, check that out first, somebody here can tell you how to restore the reg

[glc]

If there is surface damage to the hard drive, get a new hard drive - FAST!

[c-hoppe]

Did that in fact today. Copied the old one to the new one and it is in the wings waiting to be called up

[glc]

When you call it up, I would reinstall Windows and your apps to take care of the corruption that's already there - you still have a lot of missing data.