NO MBR

[Long View]

Have just taken delivery of a Samsung Laptop. Using Disk Director 10 and ATI 9.1 I can see that there is a c: partition ( primary and active) with operating system and programs. There is also a hidden NTFS partition of about 3.5 gig with about 2.5gig of data. I can not, however, see any MBR.

I would like to take an image of c: and then delete this hidden partition - I just don't like hidden things I don't understand on my pc. Then to restore c: and make a couple of other partitions.

should I be concerned that I can not see any MBR ?

[foghorne]

Originally Posted by Long View

Have just taken delivery of a Samsung Laptop. Using Disk Director 10 and ATI 9.1 I can see that there is a c: partition ( primary and active) with operating system and programs. There is also a hidden NTFS partition of about 3.5 gig with about 2.5gig of data. I can not, however, see any MBR.

I would like to take an image of c: and then delete this hidden partition - I just don't like hidden things I don't understand on my pc. Then to restore c: and make a couple of other partitions.

should I be concerned that I can not see any MBR ?

If you are able to boot, the MBR must be there in some form.

If you are going to experiment I would start by making a backup of your entire drive so you can rollback to where you are now if it all goes pairshaped.

F.

[Long View]

Originally Posted by foghorne

If you are able to boot, the MBR must be there in some form.

If you are going to experiment I would start by making a backup of your entire drive so you can rollback to where you are now if it all goes pairshaped.

F.

Thanks - that's what I intend to do. Restore disks have been included with the lap top and they do include their own recovery program ( Firstware Recovery Pro) but I would prefer to stick with Acronis.

[Long View]

Just in case this helps someone else -

I used Acronis 9.1 to make an image of C: and the hidden partition.
when I looked at the image I found that ATI had also "copied" the MBR.

I used Disk Director to delete the hidden partition and as I suspected the machine would no longer boot. Restoring the hidden partition and all was fine again.

I have now formatted the whole drive and an installing a clean version of windows Xp. Should I ever need to go back to the original however I mow have the images to allow me to do so.