Removing Acronis from the MBR

I have acronis true image, a multi boot system on two hard disks.

when i boot windows vista/xp I still get this "fatal error: boot disk (partition) not found, hit ENTER to continue?
I hit enter, and i get the vista bootloader, and everything works fine.

but I uninstalled acronis and the error is still there upon restart.

ACronis changed my MBR to display that message, now all I want to do is get it back.
Is there any way?

The Vista CD can only change the boot loader that comes after acronis' message. if I use XP CD Recovery console fixmbr, fixboot fdisk /mbr etc...it breaks the booting capabilities of both Operating systems.


What do I have to do to get that message off of my machine?

 

I like a program called EasyBCD http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

You can use it to edit the booting mechanism for Vista. Once you install Vista, you no longer use the MBR as you would in XP, so there is no Recovery Console method of fixing your issue. Boot into either OS and run the EasyBCD to fix your boot options.

Not sure you will get many answers on this forum for your issue, so you may want to try a forum dedicated to Vista issues...

Thanks.

 

Deltron88:

You can fix this with your Vista DVD. You need to replace the Acronis MBR with a standard MBR. If you tried using the automatic repair mode on the Vista DVD it may not have found anything wrong. You'll need to do this manually.

Boot your PC from the Vista DVD and choose the repair option that starts a command prompt. Enter the following command:

Code:

bootrec /fixmbr

Reference article here.

 

Thanks mark, that worked.
and yes, it originally found nothing wrong.

Im surprised that the vista bootloader was side by side with Acronis's AND xp's, and yet it still knew to overwrite the space occupied by acronis's without affecting the others.

 

They're located in two different places. The Master Boot Record (MBR) in the first sector on the hard disk was the only one that you replaced by running the bootrec command. Vista's boot loader, on the other hand, is in the first sector of the Active partition.

The Acronis MBR contains a few hundred bytes of code that attempts a jump to the Acronis Secure Zone when the PC is booted. From there, if successful, it displays a message "Press F11 for Acronis Startup Recovery Manager...", which will give you the opportunity to boot into the Acronis Recovery Environment. Since you had removed the Secure Zone there was no place to go, so instead you saw an error message.

A standard Microsoft MBR, on the other hand, is also a short little piece of code that simply searches the partition table (also in the first sector of the hard disk) for the partition that is marked as "Active". When found, it jumps to that partition and loads the code located there. In your case it loads another little piece of code that searches for the file "Bootmgr", which is Vista's boot manager, which then takes over.