MBR Pissing me off

hello everyone.

i have problem with MBR. i was using 2000 professional, it was running smooth but suddenly it gives me error of missing NTOSKRNL.exe. i tried to install OS again. the setup mode was detecting my harddisk but was not showing any sectors, cylinders etc. i tried to install a fresh MBR but i dont knw wots goin on . system is unable to format my hardrive and even not able to install any OS. can any one help me that wot hapend to it and how can i fix this problem.

Aight man, this has been going on alot in just my neighborhood. Not able to install operating systems. It sounds like you need a new harddrive, sir. I'd bet nickels to dimes if you stuck another harddrive in there that you will have a successful install. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Hard Drive sounds like a pretty good harddrive to get. It's an 80 gig and its only $70. Good luck with that.

RedRanger

You can try another OS and then try to install the os(Win2000) again to solve the problem. I had tried that thing in but the cause of problem for me was bit different cuse i tried to install win2000 when i was already running winXP. It copied all files and then gave me error that the disk could not be formattted and it also deleted MBR so i could not read the partitions. I had to install Linux first then after that i installed windows XP and did all partitioning again.

Hope that helps

Cheers

~Pranav

I had the same problem and I was able to use a harddrive recovery disk to get past that point. Once I recovered a bunch of information I was able to format the drive.

When you say the setup mode was unable to detect sectors, cylinders, etc, I assume you mean the BIOS. That sounds a bit worrying and points to a problem with your hard disk rather than corruption of the MBR or other data. A simple test would be to get hold of a bootable DOS disk with fdisk on it and attempt to delete all the existing partitions. If that works, it at least proves that your hard disk is operational. It could however still be about to fail so if you want to save time and have the spare cash it may be better to get a new disk as RedRanger has suggested.

You should also check the BIOS and verify that it is using the correct method to address the harddisk drive.

The BIOS on my last PC incorrectly identified a couple of harddisk drives that I used and for whatever reason tried to use CHS to address large 40/60 GB drives. I had to "force" the BIOS to use LBA.

Are you using a SCSI harddisk, IDE RAID card, or some other harddisk controller that Windows may not have prebundled drivers for? If so, obtain the driver for that controller and press F2 at the beginning of the Windows installation. It will allow you to specify what driver to use during the installation.