really screwed up MBR

[jimmywithtorch]

Ok here is real bad situation, perhaps ISO's were
corrupted, any help is really appriciated.

I got ISO's from
ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors.../Mandrake/iso/

problem:
(1)I had 4 partitions on 40gb hd, XP(ntfs,primary partition),
2000(ntfs), data(fat32),Mandrake 9.2(ext3), and it was working fine
(2)I got ISO files of 3 CDs from uni. of wisc mirrors.
As I didn't see 4 iso anywhere I didn't know there are
4 CDs for Mandrake 10, but thats ok
(3)I burned the cds, but the first cd was not bootable. I
checked my BIOS setting, and also tried other bootable
cds like XP and mandrake 9.2, those were able to boot.
But this Mandrake 10 won't boot
(4)I created boot floppy and started installation. It
froze at then end while writing the boot record. I had
to do hard reboot
(5)now my hard drive had corrupted MBR ......so I booted
Mandrake 10 from floppy and after linux is up , I
reinstalled lilo on MBR.
(6)mandrake 10 would now boot from the lilo menu, but
any of the windows won't.
(7)I got pissed. I tried to restore windows boot
record from rescue option of mandrake cd, didn't work.
I did fixmbr form XP cd, didn't work. I did fixboot
and fixmbr from XP cd, didn't work.
(8 ) I erased all the partitions and reformatted my
harddrive one by one with wondows, partition magic and
a software that came with my hard disc ( sw name:
maxblast by maxtor ). I also tried to '0-fill' my hard
disc with that maxblast software.
BUT my hard disc won't boot any windows installation
now. surprisingly if I reinstall linux it will boot
with no problem.

After reformatting hd and installing any windows, on
reboot. it will say "Error loading operating system".

Please any expert help. Perhaps only harddrake
development expert will be able to help. Because it
writes such a portion of partition table that no other
software or OS can access.

[variant]

boot with a windows boot floppy or any windows media and go straight to the command prompt from there do:

fdisk /mbr

then reboot and use the windows cd to reinstall windows

[jimmywithtorch]

as I said I already did fixboot and fixmbr from windows XP recovery console.

I also deleted all partitions and reformatted my all hd. nothing works

[flw]

Have you attempted a fixmbr using a win98 boot disk and win98 dos fdisk?

[mesut]

fixmbr

from xp recover console may not work, but

fdisk /mbr

from win98/ME boot disk should.

also try to set your harddrive to LBA mode from CMOS setup, if it is not.

[Giro]

Do people actually read the posts before they answer

I got pissed. I tried to restore windows boot
record from rescue option of mandrake cd, didn't work.
I did fixmbr form XP cd, didn't work. I did fixboot
and fixmbr from XP cd, didn't work.

[jimmywithtorch]

I don't think I can do fdisk /mbr on an NTFS formatted hard disk. But I did that too.

as nothing works, even erasing all partitions and reformatting whole harddrive, for now I pulled out my old 2gb hd and kept it as master and 40gb as slave. though I installed xp on 40gb hd but primary is 2gb one so it holds the MBR. and it works.

Though if someone knows solution to fix that hard disk's powerfully screwed MBR, let me know I would try that in vacation.

I know this is because they write some hidden part of MBR to co-exist with any type of windows installation. Usually it gets fixed with fixmbr but it didn't work this time may be because my computer froze while after installation linux was writing MBR or may be the ISO's were hacked on that mirror. because as I wrote in my first post the first CD was not bootable, which should be. (and please no one ask if I changed boot order n balh..blah.., because I install a new OS on some computer almost every month)

and thanx Giro for reading the whole post in details.

[flw]

I just searched all the posts and the first time you mentioned your file system was NTFS was the last one. This is very import information for anyone to have, to give you clear answers on what if any options you have.

On our part we didn't ask about your file system either so hopefully we all learned or relearned (in my case) something.

[jimmywithtorch]

ok I edited my first post and added the file systems on each partition.

Thank you

[erkje]

Well, I have the same problem...

I have a 120Gb drive, on which I installed Mandrake 10. Also at my pc the first cd was not bootable. On my laptop it boots without problem, so I think Mandrake made a mistake somewhere.
I also checked the MD5sum of the cd's so it's not a hacked version of Mandrake.

My partition table looks something like this:

hda1 ~50Gb NTFS
hda2 (extended)
hda5 /boot (ext3)
hda6 linux swap
hda7 / (ext3)
hda9 ~50Gb NTFS
hda10 ~15Gb NTFS

After installing Mandrake (without problems) I wasn't able to boot Windows anymore. I had chosen Lilo as boot loader.
First I tried to change something in lilo.conf
table=/dev/hda into table=/dev/hda1
because I want to boot from /dev/hda1
after executing the lilo-command the output was: couldn't find target (or something)

I tried the recovery console from windows XP (fixboot and fixmbr), but no result at all.

I thought: maybe this is a known problem, there will definitely be some solution...

if it was my own pc, I could live with it and solve it somehow (like jimmy, with a 2nd HD or something), but it's someone elses pc...