Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win98.fat32,microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion,microsoft.public.windows.developer.winfx.general (
More info?)
On Mon, 23 May 2005 14:32:27 -0400, "*selah*" <pzion.naax@yahoo.com>
>I'm looking for a copy of a win98 mbr for a 40G hard drive from sector 1 -
>67 for a drive that had the mbr damaged.
Sector 1 is the start of the partition boot record, if you are quoting
Norton Disk Edit terminology, where "Sector" means logical sectors
relative to the partition or volume, and "Physical sector" means,
well, physical sectors.
From here on, I'll assume you mean physical sectors.
The MBR lives on the first physical sector and nowhere else, and
exists outside of any OS, i.e. at the pre-OS system level. So it's as
meaningless to speak of "Win98 MBR" as it is to speak of "Nike foot".
Within the MBR are three things:
1) Code that boots the system, and is usually generic
2) Partition table, which is HD and installation-specific
3) End of sector boot signature bytes 55AAh
You cannot simply paste in the MBR from another system and expect this
to work, because that will kill (2). You can use FDisk /MBR to
rebuild (1), but this will only preserve (2) if (3) is present.
Using tools like FDisk /MBR to rebuild a generic (1) will not be what
you want, if (1) in your case was not generic. Examples of
non-generic (1) - i.e. master boot code - include:
- some boot partition managers
- DDO code overlays to "fix" BIOS limitations, e.g. EZIDE, OnTrack
- boot viruses
- other custom boot code, e.g. encryption
Non-standard (1) may relocate (2), and may sprawl beyond the first
physical sector so that your instinct in preserving 1 - 67 becomes
validated. You can derive (2) from an assessment of the rest of the
HD. Don't do this by creating new partitions of the same size, as
that may kill file system structures within the partitions. In
addition to this, FDisk does probe writes into the partitions
themselves, when it creates partitions, so don't use that.
See http://cquirke.mvps.org/9x/ "data recovery" section. Work
carefully, maintain an Undo trail, etc. Good luck and godspeed.
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http://cquirke.blogspot.com
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