KillrBuckeye
Member
Hi Computer Guru, and thanks for writing the guide on fixing a broken MBR. While I have not yet attempted to follow the steps in the guide, I may do so depending on what you can tell me about my specific problem.
To make a long story short, I encountered a boot problem on my Ubuntu-only machine which required me to manipulate partitions on the hard drive. Ever since I performed these partition operations, the hard drive simply refuses to boot from the MBR even though I've tried rewriting Grub to it about 25 times! I have even read the contents of the MBR into a file and I can see that Grub is successfully writing to it; however, every time I try to boot from the HDD my BIOS throws this error:
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER
I know it's not a BIOS issue because I can throw in my old HDD (containing Ubuntu with Grub installed to the MBR) in the same cable/jumper position and it boots up just fine. Further, I can start Grub from a floppy or from a LiveCD, and it will boot Ubuntu just fine when I direct it to the proper configfile on the hard drive. My thinking is that the partition operations I performed caused the problem with the MBR. To give more detail, I used GParted from an Ubuntu LiveCD to perform these operations, which included copying a partition from the beginning of the drive to the end of the drive, deleting the original parition, and creating a new small partition in its place at the beginning of the drive. I'm thinking that GParted wrote the partition table information incorrectly, or somehow overwrote part of the MBR during these operations.
Anyhow, in your guide you state that the error message that I'm receiving from the BIOS when it tries to boot from the HDD is due to screwed up partition table data, and that the solution is to rebuild the partition data. You go on to say that your guide is not intended for these types of problems. In my case, do you think your guide applies? If not, how would I go about rebuilding the partition table data if I don't have a copy stored anywhere?
Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated.
To make a long story short, I encountered a boot problem on my Ubuntu-only machine which required me to manipulate partitions on the hard drive. Ever since I performed these partition operations, the hard drive simply refuses to boot from the MBR even though I've tried rewriting Grub to it about 25 times! I have even read the contents of the MBR into a file and I can see that Grub is successfully writing to it; however, every time I try to boot from the HDD my BIOS throws this error:
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER
I know it's not a BIOS issue because I can throw in my old HDD (containing Ubuntu with Grub installed to the MBR) in the same cable/jumper position and it boots up just fine. Further, I can start Grub from a floppy or from a LiveCD, and it will boot Ubuntu just fine when I direct it to the proper configfile on the hard drive. My thinking is that the partition operations I performed caused the problem with the MBR. To give more detail, I used GParted from an Ubuntu LiveCD to perform these operations, which included copying a partition from the beginning of the drive to the end of the drive, deleting the original parition, and creating a new small partition in its place at the beginning of the drive. I'm thinking that GParted wrote the partition table information incorrectly, or somehow overwrote part of the MBR during these operations.
Anyhow, in your guide you state that the error message that I'm receiving from the BIOS when it tries to boot from the HDD is due to screwed up partition table data, and that the solution is to rebuild the partition data. You go on to say that your guide is not intended for these types of problems. In my case, do you think your guide applies? If not, how would I go about rebuilding the partition table data if I don't have a copy stored anywhere?
Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated.