No Boot Sector on Internal Hard Drive Message

[UnderdogDJLSW]

Well, I'm temporarily using my laptop from work as my Dell's hardrive has decided to go "blah." I know I'm letting myself in for a few "use a Mac" comments, etc but I wanted to know if anyone else has encountered this and what they tried. I'm going to try and restore the drive. I've no real worries as I always have a portable hard drive back-up and figure this might end in getting a new machine. I'm just not sure that even if I get it running again, the 5 year old HDD won't just flake out again.

[mitchedwards]

If you can boot off a CD rom of flash drive, and get to the dos prompt you can this go to the C drive and type in fdisk /mbr This will redo our master boot record. Its worth a shot

Well, I'm temporarily using my laptop from work as my Dell's hardrive has decided to go "blah." I know I'm letting myself in for a few "use a Mac" comments, etc but I wanted to know if anyone else has encountered this and what they tried. I'm going to try and restore the drive. I've no real worries as I always have a portable hard drive back-up and figure this might end in getting a new machine. I'm just not sure that even if I get it running again, the 5 year old HDD won't just flake out again.

[ctc]

Hmmmm....

That's weird. Doesn't it mean your computer has lobotomized itself?

I find when anything weird happens a full reformat of the hard drive works wonders.

Don C.

[Toy Talk]

If you can boot off a CD rom of flash drive, and get to the dos prompt you can this go to the C drive and type in fdisk /mbr This will redo our master boot record. Its worth a shot

That is pretty much the fix. In fact, just running fdisk and following the prompts will fix the problem (most likely). However, the question is what caused the boot record failure to begin with. Normally this type of error means the HDD is going bad, so it may be time to replace.

[UnderdogDJLSW]

Thanks all. I'll work on it over the weekend and let you know. I personally think it is time to replace, but trying not to incur another expense right now.