ever get one of those viruses that killed your hdd from booting? this may save you a few $
Have you ever had to pitch a hdd after getting a nasty virus/or after wipeing the hdd because it would not boot?. I came pretty close. After dancing around, pulling my hair and useing a few rather choice words.. i decided to do some research. I found that theres many boot viruses and not all are found by anitvirus software. Some MBR or boot sector viruses can hide in empty areas of the hdd and act like damaged sectors(i found one of these sneaky lil buggers in one of my laptops). a Scandisk will see these areas as bad sectors and Block them off so their not written to by the pc's regular usage. A simple test i found is to run Scan disk if it finds Bad sectors that werent there before, it could be a boot virus in hideing.. Boot viruses arent the only culprits to trash a MBR or Master Boot Record. Some Antivirus and System Management progs can also write to the MBR. If these Programs arent uninstalled before you wipe the Hdd it may make the hdd unbootable..If after a virus attack or you wipe your hdd your hdd becomes unbootble, there is a fix. The best repair method is to restore a backup or to use a repair disk. However, if you don’t happen to have such a recovery tool, you’ll have to do things the old fashion way. You can also forget about reformatting or repartitioning the drive, as these operations don’t effect the boot sector. First thing you will need is a start up disk. If you do not have a startup disk go here ( i used the win 98SE/OEM) from the list and follow the instructions to make one. http://www.bootdisk.com/ Now, boot the damaged system from the boot floppy. When you’ve booted the system to a command prompt, enter the following command:
FDISK /MBR
This will repair the Master Boot Record and make the system bootable.
i have found that this works for all OSes..once the MBR is repaired it should be ready for a fresh OS install..