Mixed up MBR

For some time now, I have been using Windows XP SP2 on the main hard drive, and Windows 98 SE on the slave drive. No problems. DD's OS selector lets me choose which one I want.

Then I decided to move some stuff away from the main drive, and move the 98SE operating system to the space left behind on the main drive.

Then, when I rebooted, instead of being greeted with DD's friendly face offering me a choice of operating system, default XP, I was told very briefly about error #3 with the MBR, and the system booted into Win 98SE.

So, given that moving the operating system caused the MBR to break, how to repair it? I tried booting from an XP boot floppy and was told of a missing DLL. So I tried booting from the XP system disk and doing a FIXMBR in spite of Microsoft's dire warnings.

Still booted directly into 98SE.

After much pondering, I thought that I just might have a DD startup disk. (It's not a program I use often.) I hunted around and found it (the only one!). This enabled me to get the OS selector working again. (I had tried to do this from a Bart PE disk, but the option was not available to me there.)

I have three questions here:

(1) Is it DD that decided to change my MBR to make 98SE the only operating system? If so, some kind of warning or query would be welcome first.

(2) If I had not had a DD boot disk lying around, is there anything at all I could have done, short of reinstalling XP, then running True Image from a boot disk to restore the system state to what it was before I started changing things?

(3) Is there any way, any utility, for saving just the MBR on its own?

If computers have a guardian angel, it is surely Acronis.

Anand Shraddhan
www.ultimacalc.com

 

Hello Anand,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Partition and Disk Managing Software.

The reason of the error is that MBR was not changed, but the boot sector which MBR has pointed to does not persist any more (or does not contain any boot information). If you had performed such changes (e.g. copy of a system partition) then you will need to re-activate Acronis OS Selector. It will rewrite MBR and add the appropriate changes.

You can also try to use the utilities mentioned in Acronis Help Post.

If you have any further questions please feel free to ask.

Thank you.
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Kirill Omelchenko

 

Hi Kirill,

I take it that the utility you pointed me to has the intelligence to figure out what to do to create a proper MBR.

In view of your explanation, I would suggest that it would be a good idea if DD were to warn the user to make sure to have a DD boot disk handy before proceeding to move operating systems around.

Anyway, thanks for your help.

Anand Shraddhan
www.ultimacalc.com

 

Hello Anand,

Actually, it is recommended to create Acronis Bootable Rescue Media. This recommendation appears at the last step of installation of any Acronis product. Such a media can be very helpful for the cases when your operating system is not bootable for some reason.

Thank you.
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Kirill Omelchenko