Repairing MBR of Hard Drive as Slave w/ Vista

Hi all... noob here! Thanks for your responses to my question!

I have a custom, older xeon dual quad setup, in a Thermaltake box, w/ Vista 64 Ultimate, that I was using for graphics and film editing...

She was cranking along fine for several years, until I kept getting mysterious reboots. I didn't find anything apparantly wrong and was running her anyway. I had several fellow geeks give me a cavalcade of answers to my problem, but nothing seemed to work. One of the xeons finally crapped out, and I swapped it sucessfully. But, it would still keep shutting down, and rebooting w/o notice. Finally it went into a continuous reboot cycle until the blue screen of death gave its last rites!

I pulled everything completely apart and found that the startup hard drive had a cracked and broken data connector, w/ the plastic stuck inside the cable end! I believe that was my problem all along. I never noticed that it was angled and probably shorting, and/or disconnecting. I hate these cheap plastic connectors these days! The old IDE ones were so solid feeling.

Anyway.... my question is: I slaved the broken drive onto another PC, running a 64bit ver. of XP, and I am able to access all my original files, and programs on the old drive. Can I fix the MBR in the old drive as a slave by editing the bootrec files? Is there an easy cut & paste I can do to the record, from the XP box?

The Seagate 500gb drive is still good, just physically has the broken plastic. And as long as the plug is straight it works fine. I was going to hot glue the power connector along side of the data connector to keep it in postion.

Thanks for looking... and hopefully your answers! Ron

 

Let me see if I have this right.

1. You pulled a Seagate 500 MB HDD from one machine and slaved it to a functioning drive in a different functional machine.
2. You refer to this Seagate drive as the "old" drive
3. You also refer to this same drive as the "broken" drive even though it is in fact not broken but rather has a faulty connector.
4. This "old", "broken" slaved Seagate drive is the one you now want to make bootable.

Assuming that these things are true, what makes you believe that the drive has a faulty MBR?

 

Sorry if it sounds confusing. I'll try to explain it better...

* I pulled the Seagate from my older computer because it was not booting. I used every method to try and boot from it to no avail.

* the drive is broken physically, not electronically. The tab above the data contacts is broken off and inside the cable. I have to use "that cable" w/ the plastic tab inside it, to connect the drive to a motherboard because w/o "that cable" the contacts will float around inside a new cable.

* I have access to the old/Seagate drive w/ my "newer" PC as a slave. And I want to edit the start-up files on my old/Seagate drive so it will boot again on my older computer.

I hope that is clearer? thanks for pointing out the confusion.

 

Thanks, I think I get it now. There are several reasons why you can't take the MBR from one HDD and copy it to another HDD. For one, the MBR contains the main partition table for the drive so you would mess up the partition tables on the drive you were copying to, and as such, could render the drive inaccessible from Windows altogether. Second thing is that MBR contains a disk identifier that is unique to that particular HDD and copying a foreign MBR onto an existing MBR would probably just corrupt the recipient boot sector. I don't know what things you already tried (on the Vista box) in attempting to make the unbootable drive bootable again. Were you able to boot the drive using a boot/installation/repair disk or other bootable media?

The more I think about this, the less sure I am that you can do the type of cross-platform boot repair that you are suggesting. You want to fix a Vista-installed drive using XP OS. I doubt there's any native Windows support for doing that. You could try a third party boot repair utility. The following site has a couple of freeware MBR manipulation tools that I've successfully used to repair MBRs on XP and 7:

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/downloads-free-software.htm

 

EaseUS Partition Master should be able to rebuild the MBR from your XP installation. Details and instructions available at http://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-partition-manager/rebuild-mbr.htm

MajorGeeks download - http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/easeus_partition_master_home_edition.html

 

I tried everything to get it to boot: repair disk utility, Vista install dvd, other versions of Windows, etc. The repairs would only go so far and then give me error messages. The only alternative was to wipe my drive.

I did searches and found some super-geeks that had detailed edits of boot records w/ command prompt... but, I'm too nervous to fool with that method.

I was smart enough to backup my files on the drive in question; but I have a ton of programs, applications, as well as the time it took me to update everything there. I am purchasing a new drive, but if I can get this drive functioning I'll save myself some aggravation, and work in the mean time. And if I could backup all my apps w/ their updates and install them on the new drive, that would be the cats ***!

Thanks for your reply!

 

WoW! This looks interesting! Thank you!

 

OK, now I'm confused again. I thought you said that you slaved the Seagate drive and have full access to all of the files on that drive. You don't need to make the Seagate bootable to get the data off of it. Are you looking to create a disk image of the Seagate and do a bare-metal recovery to a new drive?

In any case, if you just want to fix the MBR you can use any number of DOS tools to either overwrite your existing MBR with a custom MBR (i.e. the custom jobs you found online) or simply write a standard Windows MBR to the disk. You can even back up your existing MBR and restore it if you don't like the results of whatever it is that you decide to do with the MBR you currently have (it's only 512 bytes). You can do all of these things with a small DOS utility from this site:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/mbrcheck.html

 

Yeah, I just need it to work until I get a new drive all setup in my Vista box! That would be great to transfer all my apps & programs w/ updates to the new drive when I get it! That will save a mountain of work! Thanks!

 

You can't transfer programs. You either need to do a clean install or you can take the old drive and use a program to clone the drive to the new hard drive.

 

I'm not convinced that the MBR on the Seagate drive is bad. You're assuming that it is bad because you couldn't boot it on your other box. But the boot problems could have been due to a multitude of things other than a corrupt MBR. Just run MBRCheck and it will give you the status of all the hard drive on your system, internal and external.

It sounds to me like you want to either create and transfer a disk image or, as ploder suggested, clone the Seagate drive to a new drive. However, if your boot problems on the other machine were software related or MBR/partition related, then imaging or cloning the drive will also image/clone the boot problem. Simply copying your programs from the Seagate drive to a new drive will simply create an unbootable disk without a working Operating System. You would first need to install an OS on the disk and then transfer programs. Unfortunately, doing so will render most of your programs unusable because you would be working with a new Windows registry and AppData that doesn't contain all of the necessary program settings, preferences, etc.

Your best bet is to either image or clone the Seagate drive to the new drive. If it doesn't work then you lose nothing, other than the time it takes to reformat the new drive. The app I use for disk imaging and drive cloning is the freeware app AOMEI Backupper which you can download from their website

http://www.backup-utility.com

Also, here are a few more suggestions for disk imaging apps (however, other than Acronis and NovaSTOR I'm not certain that the others are capable of cloning):

Macrium Reflect (freeware) http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/macrium_reflect_free_edition.html
Paragon Drive Backup (freeware) http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/paragon_drive_backup.html
EaseUS ToDo Backup (freeware) http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/easeus_todo_backup_free_edition.html
Acronis TrueImage (shareware) http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/acronis_true_image_home_2013.html
NovaStor NovaBackup (shareware) http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/novabackup.html

Note that all of these apps are fairly large downloads (50 - 220 MB) because each contains a "mini" version of an operating system (WinPE or Linux) that is used in creating the boot disk that provides the user access to their unbootable system during the image restoration phase.

 

Thanks a bunch Rusty! You have been more than helpful to my problem! I'll let you know how things progress. Ron