Irreparable MBR?

Hi, I'm now facing a problem with what I think should be the MBR. My main OS is Windows 7, and I tried setting up a dual boot with linux. I've been doing this for the past two years and nothing has gone wrong before. But this time when it was about to set up the partitions, there was a error and apparently the entire partition table was erased. Nothing could recognize my hard disk. I managed to recover the partitions with RIPlinux, but whenever I try to fix the MBR, both with GRUB pointing to my existing linux partition, and with the Windows recovery disk, it always gets stuck at the point where it's supposed to write to the MBR. Does this mean that the MBR sector is physically damaged and is there a way to fix it?

 

I haven't dual booted Win7 with Linux so I can't give personal experience. My understanding is that a lot of people use EasyBCD to facilitate dual booting and find it very useful. Here is a link that says it can fix MBR problems. http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/bootsectexe-modifies-the-bootsector-not-the-mbr/ and a download link http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

Other than that I believe TestDisk writes the MBR slightly differently than Microsoft utilities in order not to use proprietary code and may be able to accomplish the task where fixmbr did not. Testdisk is command line interface but the Write MBR option is not difficult to find. There is a good Wiki on TestDisk and I find it a powerful little program.

I think I would try the EasyBCD but understand that it is a boot loader and if you don't want to use it as a boot loader than Test Disk may be worth a try.

 

Thanks for the input. I've tried TestDisk already. Doesn't seem to be helping. I may give the bootsect method a try, but I just found out that my system partition seems to be corrupted in all the critical places, including C:\Windows, C:\Program Files, C:\ProgramData and other directories. I don't see how trying to fix the boot record could corrupt the system, but my hard disk has been acting strange lately. Could be reaching the end of its life, but if those directories are corrupt then a format is the only option right? I could try recovering again but I recall it failing to scan those directories before.

 

Does the recovery disk have a chkdsk /r option. Sometimes it is just single reference that makes the whole partition seem corrupt.

I personally don't mess with trying to repair the System partition and just format but others may have less drastic options. You could also try the Manufacturer's Hard Disk Diagnostic utility. The Long/Extended test can sometimes fix corruption without harming the OS when chkdsk /r fails.

 

If you don't have an Acronis-style restorable image of Win 7 then I would say your best bet is a full reformat and reinstall. Painful I know, but you could waste days trying to fix your current problems and still have issues. My own earlier experiences of installing Linux to a Windows disk convinced me it is a very bad idea unless you first completely replace the Windows bootloader with a third party boot manager. I use Grub4DOS and have a flexible mix of OSs which don't interfere with each other in any way. But if you install Linux to a Windows disk the MS style MBR gets completely overwritten by Grub leaving you unable to use any Windows tool like the recovery console when problems arise.