Rewriting the bootsector

[twinkyman90]

OK I couldn't really find a good category to put this under but here goes. I need to write the bootsector to a hard drive to boot windows 7. The bootsector was completely removed and there's nothing there. Is there any tool that I can use to completely re-write the windows 7 bootsector to a drive completely from scratch as if no bootsector was there to begin with? I don't want to repair the bootsector I want to completely re-do it from scratch. And I want to do this from a bootable CD. There is no OS on the computer.

 

[Paperdoc]

Do you want to write to the disk your own custom boot sector? Or, do you just need to place there a good boot sector from a CD you have?

Any OS Install CD does this as a first step. The first two jobs an Install process does is to establish on the new (or used) disk the Primary Partition and to make the disk bootable. These create the Partition Table on the disk with its data on allocation of space to Partitions, and the MBR which is the first piece of machine code loaded from disk by the BIOS so that the rest of the boot process can continue. Normally the third step is then to Format this Primary Partition, thus installing a specified File System so that whatever OS you are about to install can manage the space available for files.

If you have a disk containing Win 7 and data and do NOT want to lose it all through a Partition and Format sequence and complete re-installation, that's a different problem. Then I see, you really do need to be able to re-create a proper MBR, and that usually needs either a specific utility for the job, or a byte-level disk editor utility, a known-good copy of the MBR you want, and the knowledge of how to do it. But if that's your situation, you also could have a missing or corrupted Partition Table that requires restoration, too. There are tools for that, separate from your first request.

If you really have that latter situation, you could TRY a commercial package called Getdataback NTFS. I do NOT know if it will replace a missing or faulty MBR - it DOES do a good job of recovering Partitions and their contents. On their website there is a good "Free Trial" system. You can run the software on your disk and it will show you exactly what the disk will look like IF it performs its magic for you. If you don't think that is what you want, you exit out and nothing is changed. But if that does do your job as you wish, then you pay them their price and the rescue work is done, leaving you with a repaired disk and a valid copy / license for the software you just bought. Check the website and look particularly for what it says about repair / restore the boot sector or MBR.