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ghosting an os

gobby · 2004-01-26 01:39:45

im sure a lot of you know about my recent os troubles. (if u dont its here ) well, thanks to a lot of very helpful replys i got it sorted. many thanx to everyone who posted... thing is that now that my new drive is working, i ghosted the old drive to the new one but the new one wont boot. a friend of mine suggested wiping…

26-01-2004 2:39am

#1

gobby

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im sure a lot of you know about my recent os troubles. (if u dont its here ) well, thanks to a lot of very helpful replys i got it sorted. many thanx to everyone who posted...

thing is that now that my new drive is working, i ghosted the old drive to the new one but the new one wont boot. a friend of mine suggested wiping the MBR so that the bios will search for an os and (with only the new drive plugged in) it will find it.

is this a good idea? how would i do this? it would help a lot cos i have a boot loader that i want to get rid of too (its on the MBR too).

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#2 26-01-2004 11:45am

Civilian_Target

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Nope. You wipe the MBR and you'll leave your mobo going "WTF, WTF, WTF, BEEP!" unless they've made some crazy new mobo advances in the last year. If you're running Win2k/XP what *might* work is ghosting like you say, and then running 2k/XP recovery off the CD and running FIXMBR. Of course it's equally possible it'll say WTF WTF.

Or you can run Konoppix live linux (off a CD-ROM) which in theory should find your partition after ghosting, and allow you to put LILO in the MBR and then let LILO redirect you to Windows, or any OS you might install.

Generally messing about with your MBR is an incredibly dodgy and generally irreversible procedure, but if your willing to go for it, usually one of these two methods work.

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#3 26-01-2004 12:30pm

zoro

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strange .. i've wiped my mbr numerous times and it always booted from teh default master ide1 drive on boot!!

and this is on a VERY old machine too PII 350

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#4 26-01-2004 12:36pm

egan007

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Hi i have had this problem b4
and it turned out to be a silly mistake by me..
it may not be your problem but check out
use fdisk to make sure the partion is made active.
It can loose it's active state after ghosting.

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#5 27-01-2004 2:00am

gobby

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egan007, yeah i used fdisk to see if the partition was active and it wasnt. so i set it to be the active partition but it still wont boot.

it just gives a blank screen with a flashing cursor in the corner. might be something to do with the bootloader.

how do you get rid of a MBR boot loader? i want to get rid of it anyways. i tried before by using the mandrake install disks but there was no option to uninstall.

any ideas anyone?

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#6 27-01-2004 2:38pm

Rambo

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forget this

Nope. You wipe the MBR and you'll leave your mobo going "WTF, WTF, WTF, BEEP!" unless they've made some crazy new mobo advances in the last year.

boot up with 98 second disk
type this command at dos prompt
fdisk /mbr

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