Is there a sector surgeon in the house?!

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Is there a sector surgeon in the house?!

I am not afraid of registry and drive-sector edits, but this one goes beyond my experience.

These shots are from two different programs looking at the same two drives, and it seems both of my drives’ MBRs are messed up. All operating systems (with Mint yet to be re-installed) presently boot and run just fine, but this might help explain my past trouble with Mint’s boot and with some recent reinstallations of device drivers and with Win7 balking just a little this morning. And as an aside: Win7 sometimes says its startup is messed up, but its repair utility cannot fix it and it ultimately always starts anyway.

Does anyone here have any experience with reconciling a partially-corrupt MBR?

And after I get this fixed, I have a similar problem with a dual-boot (98se-XP) system I took to a friend yesterday. In that particular case, Windows Explorer (98se) became overwhelmed while copying several freebie games disks and somehow messed up that system’s boot. An application of “FDISK /MBR” got XP booting again, but 98se can only go partway before stopping at a “sector not found on C:” error. So in that case, the problem is simply about the boot sector not knowing the end of the C: partition, I think.

Help!

(edit) Some screen shots are over here:

http://lounge.windowssecrets.com/index. ... pic=773413

Last edited by leejosepho on 21 Mar 2010, 8:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

Norton used to make utilities back in the day that might do this. Not sure how you'd find 'em, maybe orphan software?

I thank you, and I will do some looking.

I think my only real problem here might be with the Win7 partition showing twice in Disk Management in 2k and XP even though it shows okay in its own Disk Management.

I changed my screen shots to .jpg, so maybe this one will show here now:


[img][650:305]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5489953/dmxp.jpg[/img]

That "53.05 Unallocated" is actually the Win7 partition next to it, and maybe that erroneous showing is why Mint does not see any other operating systems anywhere on my machine and why Win7 occasionally balks at startup ...?!

It might partly be the different types of formats involved. XP can support FAT or FAT32, but I would imaging System7 to be NTFS at the least.

Hey dont use ntfs for mint! Use ext3 or 4.

Also if linux and windows are going to share data, a common fat32 drive is the way to go.

I think he just use that as a place holder before installing linux.


Did you create the partition for Win7 before install like you did for linux, or did you leave it unallocated and let Win7 created it. Since Vista, M$ doesn't align partition to CHS boundary anymore. It could be why 2k and XP are having problems. Also have you used any programs to delete/resize partitions after Win7? Besides the CHS issue, a lot of programs also have problem with Win7's recovery partition.

oth, are those older versions of Windows fully patched? Even XP has problems with 128GB+ harddisk before SP2.


You'll have to be more specific but here is 1 thing you'll encounter. Every time you boot Win7 after having used any pre-Vista NTFS-aware OS, Win7 will have to reconstruct the volume shadow. You'll also lost all data backed by that feature (eg: previous version, restore point).

If it were up to me I would use a sector repair program off the Ultimate Boot CD. I use MBRwiz to repair HD Tables. Then use Salvation Scan and Restore to get rid of bad sectors.
In a Dual-Boot configuration like that I would Install Windows 7 1st and then the rest. It will take care of File System errors.

Norton Utilities cannot handle FAT32 or NTFS, can it?

Using a linux bootdisk (Knoppix) you can use dd command
(which is probably a good thing to learn before using, since it is complicated).

VISTA has HDCP, which is a self-destruct DRM mechanism that also
exists in HDTVs. Basically, it kills the machine if it even thinks its being
hacked by the user. You might want to clone the drive to restore
it after HDCP trips. I have no idea if HDCP changes the state of the
video card when it drops the bomb on you, but I do know that HDCP is
the reason WHY the video card has more cores than the processor does.

HDCP is another big bite out of your soul that you agreed to by clicking EULA.
Google it, or plan your hard drive's funeral before the surgery.

Wow, lots of great insight and advice here, and I thank each of you very much. I will definitely do my homework and take a look at all the utilities mentioned.

I must be off to work for now, but I will get back here and answer questions this afternoon. Overall, I pretty much stumbled through making partitions as I went along ... and yes, the NTFSs in the Mint spots are only temps, but now I think I see a need to reformat the ones Mint does not format during installation.

In the case of the Win7 partition, either FDISK or Win2k had marked the end of the drive short, so it (the Win7 partition) was at first two pieces. Neither 2k nor XP nor the Win7 installation could fix that, so I used Easus Partition Manager to make those two pieces into one, and then I had Win7 format it during installation. Its "shadow" partition showed up later on, but I do not remember when or how.

I am catching on now, and I thank you and Cloud Walker for your explanations about types of formats and their effects.



During my last-previous installation, the option of formatting "swap" did not appear. So, I should just format all three partitions as FAT32, then let Mint reformat "/" (system) as ext4? If I am understanding correctly, FAT32 will work for "swap" and will also let me share "/home" with Windows.



I do not yet understand about Win7's recovery partition, but maybe you are talking about a relatively small space I think is "reserved" at the end of the drive? I may have been messing around a bit too much to satisy my curiosity, and I cannot recall everything I have done. But at some point I did use some Easeus software (I think) to make that space at the end of the drive visible.

In any case, no, Win7 did not create its own partition, at least not initially. By the time I got to Win7's installation, its space was actually showing as two pieces since neither 2k nor XP could see the end of the drive and one or the other had "marked" as far as it *could* see ... and then when none of the Windows systems could make those two spaces into one, I used Easeus to do that ... and then I probably used Win7's installation options to delete and remake and format the Win7 partition.



Yes, each was fully updated and patched prior to the next installation.



Maybe that helps to explain the trouble I had a week or two ago when both Mint and Win7 seemed confused about devices during bootup? Win7 re-installed them all, and Mint never made it at all.

Overall, I am beginning to ponder the thought of just ditching Win7 altogether.

That is what I plan to take a look at in just a few minutes.



That is truly disturbing! Is the same true with Win7?

If anyone might want to see what Easeus might have to say, I have posted a question over there:

http://forum.easeus.com/viewtopic.php?p=26688#26688

gamefreak: I could not get MBRwiz to download.

I was just planning to go pre-format the Mint partitions as FAT32, but then I got to wondering whether I should do that in 2k, XP or Win7!

When my 2k fomats FAT32, Easeus says it is FAT16 and 98se cannot recognize it. XP does okay as far as I know, but then might Win7 have trouble? Most of my writing back down to the 98se FAT32 partition is done from 2k, but I have likely also done that from XP and Win7 ... so maybe pre-formatting the Mint partitions as FAT32 from within 98se might be the most "backward compatible" approach?!

Argh. Maybe I should just call it a night.

You can't use FAT under Linux for anything other than sharing files between systems. It doesn't work to put /home on a FAT partition, because FAT doesn't support Unix permissions. Swap won't work either, because swap partitions do not contain a filesystem at all (they are basically unstructured collections of pages written out from memory), and Linux will not swap to a filesystem partition or any other partition without a Linux swap header, in order to avoid destroying filesystems.

Ah, okay ... so then what is the best way to get all the formatting done? During my past trials, Mint formatted its "/" partition during installation, but it did not offer a format option for the partition I selected for "swap" and this next time around will be my first at having a "/home" partition.

Maybe I need to go read the manual some more!

Perfectly phrased.

You can also, with little trouble, arrange a file that acts as a swap partition, much like how windows works. This would save a partition slot. It would be created after the install however. In this case you will want to leave room in the root partition for an extra file of size whatever.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq


This usual means of sharing files is an extra partition, fairly small, of fat32. By this means neither linux nor windows risks writing directly to each others file systems. I just tend to use a USB thumb drive.

Recently I finally made use of my swap space. I was processing video frames and managed to saturate 98% of my ram and about the same of swap. One problem I ran into was a /tmp that wasnt large enough. As it is part of root, and I will be doing further video, I will enlarge it by separation into its partition.