Grab your Phillips, it's...
The Latest from The Screwdriver List!
I don't know if this anecdote will be helpful...but it might be.
I am reminded of a time many years ago when I had a problem writing to a
hard disk. First I tried editing my AUTOEXEC.BAT file. But when I rebooted
I found that nothing had changed. And sure enough, my edits had failed to
"stick."
The machine had two hard disks in it, so I copied that batch file to the
second hard disk and edited it there without any problem. And I saw that it
had changed by examining its contents after I had exited the editor. Then I
copied it to the C: drive. And even though there was no reported error, I
found that the AUTOEXEC.BAT file on the C: drive had not changed at all!
The copy had failed, without any indication to me that it had failed. (And
I even had the Verify flag set in the DOS environment.)
Eventually, after much fussing around, I figured out what the problem was.
There is was line in the hard drive cable (from the hard drive
controller--this was long enough ago that the two were separate) that had
to be in the active state to permit writing to the hard drive. (I believe
that even in modern EIDE drives there is such a wire in the cable...perhaps
it is #23 out of 44 wires, if I am reading my reference correctly.)
In my instance, the cable connector was not making good contact with that
one wire--and only that one wire. So in effect, my hard disk was "write
protected." Once I fixed that (with a new cable), all was copacetic once more.
* * *
In your situation, perhaps the MBR got "munged" some time in the past, and
then in the present setup that wire is not contacting well, so you cannot
repair the data damage.
The worse possibility is that your hard disk actually has a defective MBR.
If that is the case, the drive is history. Fortunately, drives are really,
really cheap (in historical terms) these days, so you can replace it with
relatively little financial pain.
Good luck. And if you do find the problem to be some simply described and
fixed one, let us all know, please.
John
At 11:27 AM 12/1/01 -0800, you wrote:
>Grab your Phillips, it's...
>The Latest from The Screwdriver List!
>
>
>I picked up a used hard drive and am having trouble getting it installed. Is
>there a way to repair the MBR or should I trash it?
>It is only a 4.3 GB drive and I am sure that my mobo and bios can handle it.
>Bios is Ali Aladdin V, the mobo has AGP port and 2 usb ports and UDMA 33.
>When I go to bios to auto detect it only detects the correct parameters 1 in
>25 attempts. I have the cylinders and heads and sectors info from the case
>of the drive.
>When the drive is detected and I boot to dos and run fdisk it sees a non dos
>partition. I delete the non dos partition but fdisk cannot create a new dos
>partition. After that it cannot even detect the drive. If I check again the
>non dos partition is still present..
>I have a program from Seagate, the drives mfr., to install drives, it will
>get to the final step of creating a new partition and say there is a serious
>problem with the MBR and cannot continue error 8001H.
>I have another utility MBRtool. It reads the MBR and allows me to edit it
>but I do not know how. It has a switch to write a wintel MBR to the drive
>and to completely wipe the mbr but every time I try it, it says it cannot
>read the mbr.
>I have tried norton rescue disk but it cannot detect the drive.
>Where do I go from here?
>TIA
>Jerry Turba
=======
John M. Goodman, Ph.D., author of "Peter Norton's Inside the PC," Seventh
Edition (Sams 1997, ISBN 0-672-31041-4), and Eighth Edition (Sams 1999,
ISBN 0-672-31532-7).
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