I have this one Seagate ATA drive that for the second time now has a corrupt MBR. The evidence is booting the computer leads to a "disk read error, press control alt del to restart." I can boot to a BartPE disc and see the contents of the drive OK, and a chkdsk shows no errors. I am currently running the SeaTools extended test on the drive, which I did the last time this happened, as well as running SpinRite at level 4 & 5. I have done the fixboot and fixmbr from the recovery console as well. Nothing I do will repair the damaged MBR. Fixmbr says the boot record is non-standard, but it cannot repair it even though it says it did. I can run it over and over again and it always says non-standard and that it was repaired. The only way I was able to use this drive again from the first time this happened was to repartition and reinstall the OS.
I'm most likely going to RMA the drive, but I'm really curious as to what is going on and why fixmbr can't fix it while repartitioning can. Is there any other trick I'm missing? -- Mike Gill ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
