MBR Problem?

[Hellbreather]

Hey Everyone!

So, my dad recently frantically phoned me and told me that when plugged in his PC the other day, the back of it sparked and refused to turn on, he told me he just wanted the HDD taken out and put into another PC.
Which I have done.

Now, when I boot the PC it hangs on the following:

"Searching for boot record for IDE-0...OK"

I had seen this before back in the day of IDE and went to have a scan of the drive dragging out "Hirens Boot CD"

The Sectors are fine. However, when I looked at the HEX of the MBR I could see along the right hand side it said the following:

"Invalid Partition Table, Problem Loading Operating System, Missing Operating System"

My dad has quite cleverly thrown away his WinXP CD's so I'm hoping with your help we can get to the bottom of this problem with just Hiren's Boot CD or any other bootable program you suggest. It's 11pm Im tired and I want to fix it

Thanks.
Hellbreather.

 

[johnb35]

You may have other issues with a bad drive now, BUT, you just can't take the harddrive that has windows installed on it and put it in a different computer and expect it to boot. You would have to do at least a repair install of the OS. However, in this case, you would want to download the drive makers disk diagnostic utility and run a long scan on the drive to verify the drive is still good. If its good, you would have to repair the OS, since you don't have an install cd you would have to buy a new copy.

 

[tyttebøvs]

The Sectors are fine. However, when I looked at the HEX of the MBR I could see along the right hand side it said the following:

"Invalid Partition Table, Problem Loading Operating System, Missing Operating System"

Don't be worried about that. All MBRs have those strings. They will only be displayed, if something goes wrong.