PC eye

You'll notice that the outdated page there still show missing or corrupted boot files not a drive with no OS on it like one used specifically for storage where no OS is installed or the drive was reformatted and made a storage drive.

The screen shot clearly shows a live for cd Linux distro having ready access to two working drives with MS partitions were files can be easily retrieved if necessary. Gee? I guess Linux offers an alternative method you don't like for some reason. hhmmm....

__________________
Turning the Tongue into a Device Controller
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Sma...ory?id=5647175

Is EBay going out of the Auction Business?
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SirKenin

That would be because both drives are functioning properly to begin with, as in they're not totalled. The Windows install may be corrupted and failing to boot, but the rest is in tact. In other words, you're going off on a tangent, arguing that the sky is blue after losing the debate whether there was a sky there at all.

For all the time you wasted loading the Ubuntu, all you do is hook the drive to a running Windows computer with an R-driver, copy the files in My Computer and burn them to a DVD.

And, anyone here can attest to the fact that there is indeed an error message that shows up when you try to boot to a harddrive that isn't formatted or has missing boot information. It tells you to insert your boot media and press a key to continue.

tyttebøvs

I think it is a matter of understanding what happens. When you initialize a new disk in Windows, it will write the magic number (AA55), boot strap code and a disk signature to the mbr.

When you try and boot from this mbr, it will just give boot back to bios if there is no partition marked as active.

If the disk has not been initialized (the mbr is missing the magic number) bios will not even try and boot from it.

If the disk has been initialized, but the boot strap code is missing/damaged the computer will just hang.

PC eye

The concept behind using a live for cd distro is quite simple in nature. When you can't read from a drive as well as not being able to boot up with it but the drive can still be read from having working read/write heads the OS is loaded totally independent from a cd-r.

Even if both of the drives seen in the image were lacking boot information you can still see right onto both without problem. The same could be done with one drive being a usb model with the boot information corrupted on the other host drive and refusing to boot up.

If the heads on the OS drive are still good you can still copy files from that onto another one even if the host is seeing bad sectors. You simply won't be able to rescue anything where the bad sectors are present.

As far as the bootstrap also a rather old term and how the bios plays a role once the OS has created an mbr that gets into a little more detail.

BIOS role in bootstrap

1. The BIOS loads sector zero (CHS=0:0:1) of the boot drive to linear address 7C00h
2. The BIOS checks the loaded sector for the magic bootstrap signature bytes: 55h at offset 510 and 0AAh at offset 511. Many BIOSes will load and execute sector zero, regardless of the value of these bytes. MBRs, however, will check for the presence of these bytes.
3. CPU register DL is set to the boot drive number: 0 for floppy drive A, or 80h for hard drive C.
4. BIOS jumps to sector 0 code it just loaded.

Further details like the mbr's role in the bootstrap can be looked over at http://my.execpc.com/~geezer/osd/boot/index.htm

__________________
Turning the Tongue into a Device Controller
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Sma...ory?id=5647175

Is EBay going out of the Auction Business?
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=5626840&page=1

tyttebøvs

The point was, if you initialize the harddrives with the normal tools (most of the disk management) in Windows, they will all have a similar mbr.

So when you instruct your bios to boot on a specific drive, it will be the bootstrap code in the mbr that determines what will happen next: boot from the partition marked active, or give boot back to bios.

If you have an active partition, but the partition doesn't contain the boot files, you will get another specifc error message. Most often it will complain about a missing ntldr og bootmgr file

SirKenin

Thank you for the cut and paste Google link.

And, in case anyone doubts that this guy is a Google-fraud, check out the following search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=BIOS+...x=&startPage=1

And check out the very first link on the page. Given all of his other contributions, there's absolutely no doubt the guy hits Google, then copies and pastes the data, and absolutely no doubt that he almost never reads the entire article and most certainly no doubt that most the time he has absolutely no comprehension of what he is pasting.