IT help needed - Fixing corrupt MBR on hard drive

[sgillow]

My parents desktop PC ran out of hard drive space, I decided to kill 2 birds with 1 stone and buy a new larger hard drive and reinstall XP on it which would also make the whole thing faster.

 

I backed up the old disk onto an external USB hard drive and then switched hard drives over (I still have the old hard drive safely in a cupboard), I did the reinstall of XP, when installing XP it gave me a choice of 2 hard drives to install it on, I assumed this was a quirk of it being a brand new hard drive and selected the one I thought was the proper one. It turns out that one of them was the external USB drive, therefore I have managed to corrupt the MBR on the external drive.

 

Now when I plug the external drive into any computer it doesn’t map a drive for it and in disk management it comes up as unallocated, I am happy to reformat it and start again but without a drive mapping I cant do this. Can anyone tell me how to go about fixing the MBR on the drive so that it maps a drive and I can then reformat the drive and start again. I have done some googling but I cant find any free software to fix the disk, any suggestions?

 

Thanks,

Simon

[GrolschUK]

If it's showing in disk managment, and you don't care about the data on it, right click on the unallocated area, and partition/allocate it.

That should then make it able to be formatted. (also done by a right click in disk managment)

[IainB]

fdisk /mbr though you will need to get it into command line mode first

[sgillow]

Thanks I will go with GrolschUK's idea first.

[KaptainKremmen]

fdisk /mbr though you will need to get it into command line mode first

 

I thought that only worked on the boot partition?

 

Quick search for free stuff gave this this...... might do what you want.

[Shindig]

So you have created a Master Boot Record on the USB external HD, and installed XP on it.

 

I would unplug the USB HD and first install XP on the brand new internal HD.

Once installed plug the USB HD back in.

Go to computer management - Disk management- The drive should appear. Right click on the drive at the top or the long bar at the bottom of the screen - Create new partition - Primary - logical.

 

All your data will be erased.

[dmb]

A mate of mine had the same problem recently and used FIXMBR off the setup disk to sort it out. Not sure how though, sorry. Google "fixmbr" might help.