Yes Virginia fdisk /mbr does work on Windows98se
and it didn't shuffle my partition directory


To whom it may concern.

It only took about a year (booting into Windows with Lilo) before I 
finally figured this out, reading all the horror stories on the Internet 
about how fdisk would scramble my hard drive and the warning messages 
saying the same. I did everything else I could before trying the mbr 
directive of fdisk. It was only a last ditch, desperate result that I 
finally typed in fdisk /mbr at the command prompt and hit return. I closed 
my eyes, but guess what? It didn't destroy my hard drive.. In less than a 
tenth of second, it rewrote my messed up mbr without shuffling my 
partition directory. What a great day. I could live without fear again. My 
data, it was back.

When my mbr first got corrupted there were a lot of horror stories going 
around about some virus that attacked mbr's specifically. Not so here. I 
used a bunch of messed up floppy drives. In my 'break it' mentality days I 
would just pull a floppy off the scrap heap and plug it in. However 
floppy's, I believe access the same start up sector as the hard drive, and 
I read in Mark Minasi's book that sometimes this would do something to 
that sector. A twisted or loose ribbon cable was often the culprit.

So that's how my hard drive mbr got corrupted: a scrap floppy drive, most 
likely. I've never opened an attachment. I don't believe I opened any exe 
files that I was unsure of, so I can only assume it was a broken floppy 
drive.

That's it. I'd like to spend time writing the full account, but in the 
interim I put this information here in the hopes it will save someone else 
from the terror of loosing hours, weeks, or years of data because their 
mbr is corrupted. But as always I take no responsibility in the integrity 
of this information and you are totally responsible for the information on 
your hard drive. Back it up.


Write if you have similar success so we can document it or if you have any 
questions.

 

 

 

ADDENDUM: May 20, 2004. I rewrote bzImage. I've done it a hundred times, 
it seems, cd to the src/linux directory in RedHat 6.1 using kernel 
2.2.12.20 I believe (I haven't upgraded). I xconfig and set a few 
conditions for the kernel. make dep, make clean, and then bzImage. No big 
deal. Always worked fine.

This time it corrupted the MBR on my Windows drive. Now hear me out. This 
is bizarre.

I use a dual boot system. On one hard drive I have Windows 98. On the 
other I have RedHat 6.1. Windows is plugged into the primary ide bus and 
RedHat into the secondary. Totally seperate, totally isolated. When I want 
to change operating systems I select the hard drive through the bios. If I 
want to use RedHat I turn the primary (with Windows) off. If I want to use 
Windows I turn the secondary off in the bios. It's worked for years.

This time, however, when I did bzImage it corrupted the MBR on the Windows 
drive, which was switched off in the primary of the bios. I'd done it 
before, written bzImage, and it didn't corrupt the MBR. This time both 
MBR's were corrupted. Neither the primary or the secondary would boot 
until I reinstalled RedHat and performed the fdisk /mbr on the Windows 
drive.

Everything's back to normal. It only took a few minutes, but if anybody 
who reads this has the hardware expertise to understand how a disk 
controller works, I'd sure like to hear your thoughts. Thanks.


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