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.
