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Missing operating system issue

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Last response: February 1, 2010 11:09 PM in Windows 7

reuelreuel

January 22, 2010 6:20:05 PM

Hello!

A couple days ago my computer
was running (a friend was playing Dragon Age) when the power on my block suddenly went out due to a storm. Upon starting up my computer after power was restored, I kept on getting the "missing operating system" error.

I have deduced that it is caused by a corrupt master boot record after much research. I'm using the following guides to help me out with getting my computer back up and running:
- http://www.faultwire.com/solutions-...
- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321626

Some things to note about my computer: The OS is currently running on a RAID 0 array of two 250GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS hard drives. Normally when I boot, I can see the nVidia raid utility to check the status of the RAID stripe. With this "missing operating system" error, it simply skips that raid utility which leads me to believe that there is something affecting the RAID setup.

Now before I try replacing the MBR/partition table as suggested on the Faultwire site, I wanted to know if anyone can offer some solutions or suggestions that I can try before attempting to do this. I was kinda dumb and didn't backup
for the past month or so, so I'd like to see if I can get past this issue without having to format the HDs.

Thanks for all future help!

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chunkymonster

January 22, 2010 6:43:43 PM

Before doing anything with the MBR and/or partition table, did you verified that the RAID array is the first boot device and that the nVidia RAID utility is enabled in the BIOS?

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reuelreuel

January 22, 2010 6:45:16 PM

Yes, the RAID array is the first boot device and the RAID utility is definitely enabled. Sorry I didn't mention that before!

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chunkymonster

January 22, 2010 9:52:29 PM

Cool...good...

It seems like the next logical step would be repair the MBR.

The MS support site you linked pretty much explains what you need to do.

The only other thing that I can think of would be to use some disk utilities to pull the data off the drives to recover any files in case things get really buggered. I recommend checking out www.runtime.org and taking a look at RAIDReconstructor and/or GetDataBack for NTFS. It's free to download to determine if the app will recover the data for you but you must buy a license to unlock full funtionality. I've used to recover data after a bothced RAID5 affair.

Good luck!