vista mbr

asdfguy

asdfguy

New Member
Ok, long story short, I may have sort of deleted my MBR for vista on one of my HD's:D. I have XP on other HD though. I tried to use the recovery console on my Vista disk, but it didn't find a problem. Any ideas on how to fix it?

Here's my thought, it seems to be a real PIA but it's all I've got at the moment. I thought I could make an image of my Vista HD, then reinstall Vista then reinstall the image I made to get all my programs and info back on to a HD that boots Vista. What do ya think?
 
I said it didn't find the problem, not program. FIXMBR & FIXBOOT aren't options w/ Vista.

This is what happens. I boot to my Vista disk, select repair then Vista gives me about 5 options or so. The first option is the only one that is relivant to my problem, which says something to the effect of "Scan to see why Vista won't startup". So I click it and it returns with "can't find a problem". So, I click another option wich brings me to a DOS prompt, only it shells me to "X:\Source" I believe, in which case, within the Vista DOS promt, I don't have the option for fixmbr or fixboot, even when I "cd c:\"

I guess at this point, my question should be, "if I re-install an image, does it also copy the MBR as well?". So, if I have an image of my HD w/ a bad MBR, and reinstall it, will I be accomplishing anything?
 
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i am so good. vista changed there fixmbr and fixboot. It is now "bootrec /fixmbr" and "bootrec /fixboot"
 
there is not much difference in the mbr code between xp and vista. the real magic happens in the boot record of the partition. /fixboot fixes this
 
tyttebøvs said:
there is not much difference in the mbr code between xp and vista. the real magic happens in the boot record of the partition. /fixboot fixes this
Click to expand...

well considering they totally nixed the boot.ini file and now its an executable and MS is not releasing specific information on it in a well organized manner I would say it is actually different.
 
yes the boot loader is different. but the mbr is about the same.

boot.ini is the configuration file. The real boot loader in xp is ntldr, which is also an executable.
 
I recently somehow deleted the Vista bootloader and my solution was to install Ubuntu, which to me was the fastest way to boot into Vista, and then once I booted into Vista to rebuild the bootloader using mbrfix.
 
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