need to restore mbr

[Nealybird]

Help please---
I instaled a new drive, used drive image to copy old drive over to it. After a few days got a message from Norton antivirus that master boot record had changed, and mistakingly said to change back to the previous mbr. Well, that was dumb. I ended up losing two extended partitions worth of stuff...

Anyway, I had norton save the previous mbr to a floppy. Do think I can find how to get it back??? Hell no. Been searching for hours.
Somebody help me out?

thanks!

[rangeral]

Did you try starting up with a bootdisk at the prompt type fdisk /mbr? If not try it.

[Nealybird]

yup. tried that.
I just need to know how to get norton, or whatever proggy to
restore it from floppy. Norton had me save the old one there, so there must be a way to get it back.
Can't find in the menus how to do it.
can't find on their website how do do it.
can't find in these forums how to do it.
can't find in their help files how to do it.

.....

[rangeral]

Go to your hd's site and d/l their diagnostic utility and see what it reports maybe it will offer to fix it, they all have one.

[Nealybird]

thanks for the reply.
It's a Western Digital 80 gig. I d/l diagnostic thing which just told me it found no errors.
anyone else?
how about one of the ontrack things or something. If I new which one would restore a deleted partition I would get it. I'm running ME btw.

[rockinmale]

Originally posted by Nealybird
Help please---
I instaled a new drive, used drive image to copy old drive over to it. After a few days got a message from Norton antivirus that master boot record had changed, and mistakingly said to change back to the previous mbr. Well, that was dumb. I ended up losing two extended partitions worth of stuff...

Anyway, I had norton save the previous mbr to a floppy. Do think I can find how to get it back??? Hell no. Been searching for hours.
Somebody help me out?

thanks!

This could be an option. You already tried using the /mbr parameter. Which didnt work of course. From what i read off the microsoft knowledge base.

Microsoft Quote:
This program is written to the disk by the fdisk /mbr command and is usually called the master boot record. During typical operation, Fdisk writes this program to the disk only if there is no master boot record.

NOTE : The fdisk /mbr command only re-writes the MBR on the system drive (DISK-0) using BIOS calls. You cannot specify any other drive for the fdisk /mbr command to operate on other than DISK-0.

Chances are your other two logical drives are intact. I propose fdisking the primary partition and setting up a new primary partition. Format and reload your operating system. Im not sure how much data you will lose by deleting your primary partition, but you should be able to keep your logical drives intact. That's the best i can do for you....right now.:D

There's not alot of options, unless someone else has a opinion. :)

[Nealybird]

hmmm.
Interesting, and thanks for the suggestion. But, sounds kind of wacked. Yes, I think the logical drives are intact, but right now they show up as unallocated space. I don't see what good wiping the primary partition would do for getting them back.
Are you saying that if I fdisk the primary partition out of there,
then I wouldn't have a mbr and therefore could restore the old mbr with fdisk /mbr?? I guess I don't follow.
Anyway, if it does make sense somehow I suppose I could do that, but would rather not of course.

anybody know if norton system works might have something in it to get back "deleted" partitions (although these weren't really).
Or any other software that's good for that kind of thing?

thanks again folks.

[Nealybird]

one further development.... The answer to my original question about hor to restore the mbr after norton AV has reverted to an earlier one and you save to a floppy- you just run a file on the floppy called undoboot.exe.
however the backed up copy on mine can't be read from the floppy, so I'm still needing another solution.

laterz...

[rangeral]

Did you set the jumper on master usually westerns don't need to be jumped if its the only drive in your sys check the diagram on the drive it should say to put the jumper on the rite horizontally. I imagine your using an 80wire ribbon for this drive and not the old 40wire, you may know this already but just covering the bases. Maybe this virus damaged the drive, take it back if you got it from a local shop and replace it.

[Nealybird]

thanks for the ideas. yea, drive is working fine, and I don't anticipate any problem setting up the other partitions, but I was
holding out in hopes of recovering the data that was on them.