What is Master Bood Record ? How to fix problems with master boot record

[ben2ong2]

 So what is Master Boot Record (MBR)? Master boot record is the first sector of the disk that is accessed by you computer BIOS as soon as it boots up. So what does it mean ? It means that your ability to boot to a particular operating system depends upon the correctness of Master Bood Record. If you have ever installed two or more operating system, your ability to select an operating system is controlled by master boot record. Assume if you are not able to boot due to your dislike of the changes in boot loader process or corruption in MBR (btw, this could happen for a variety of reasons, right from virus to your own experiments with multi boot process.. I have seen this happening a lot on my PC since I have a dual cpu system with Mandrake 8.1 on one partition and Windows XP on another with Mandrake graphical Master Boot Menu ) you have to correct the master boot record.Assuming you are in Windows XP, you have to put WINDOWS XP CD in your drive and make it reboot next time in recovery console. 1. Simplest way to do this would be to would be to navigate to START-RUN and type D:\i386\winnt /cmdcons (D: is the CDROM drive in my computer) and let the process finish and reboot.2. Once rebooted, system would prompt you to choose recovery console and chose it by entering proper menu id number (by default should be 1). Once console is loaded do enter this command FIXMBR /device/harddisk0 (where harddisk0 refers to C: drive where WINDOWS XP is installed by default). This would fix your master boot record to default XP boot. By the way FIXMBR command is only available from recovery console. What to know more about FIXMBR, visit Microsoft TechNet site If you have followed the instructions correctly, you are done.