Repairing MBR in XP without a CD

[Xerol Oplan]

I'll start this out by saying Dell sucks. My laptop has always had heat problems (due to there being no kind of internal ventilation system whatsoever, save for a small fan blowing directly over the CPU), and yesterday my harddrive crashed. (I'm posting this from a friend's computer at MAGFest, but I have no machine to get online with from home right now, so it might take me some time to read any replies.)

After running all kinds of tests and doing some live CD magic I determined that the MBR on the boot partition (which also has about 70 gigs of files, including all my music source files, all my code, and a ton of other crap that I absolutely can't lose since I haven't done a backup in months) is fried. I can't mount it in two different linux distributions, but I can mount the other two partitions (the Diagnostic partition, which I managed to boot to several times, ran all the diagnostics, and found NOTHING WRONG) and the recovery partition, which (when hitting Ctrl-F11 to boot to) gives me the option of either completely wiping the drive and restoring XP, or rebooting.

Now here's the problem, Dell didn't ship my laptop with an XP CD. There's a utility you can access when booting from the CD that will allow you to examine and possibly repair the MBR, but I have no way to do that since the "CD" is just this recovery partition.

However, I do have a 128MB USB key, and I did manage to get one of the two live CDs to recognise it. So, if I can find some tool that will work in linux to repair or at least examine the MBR, and is under 128 megs, I might have a chance at saving at least some of the data. I'm planning on getting a new laptop soon anyway, but I definitely need to be able to get back to this old data somehow. Keep in mind that I haven't really used linux much at all so I'm not sure what I'm looking for or what to do, but at least I can still USE the computer, and the thumbdrive gives me a means of storage so I can move things to it for now.

I did try putting the harddrive in my USB enclosure, which resulted in windows giving a "power surge error" when it finally recognised it as a harddrive (which in itself took several minutes).

Also, since after tonight I probably won't be able to get online for 2 weeks, if you can help in any way please call me, my number is (410)905-0165. I don't pick up numbers I don't know, so leave a voice message the first time, then I'll call you back.

[phill]

Basically what you are looking for is the fixmbr command in the windows recovery console. As far as I remeber dell includes this somewhere (my assumption would be the diagnostic parition).

[Horseboy]

else try this maybe http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

[Xerol Oplan]

Nope, I've gone through all of both extra partitions and it's not on either of them. Like I said, the third partition is just a screen that says "Recover" and "Reboot", of which the first option will end up formatting it.

And I've come across another problem, I can't actually read files that are on the USB key, so anything I can run would need to be put on there some other way. Is there a way to 'edit' an ISO to add more files to it?

Also, for the most part, I was looking for some sort of similar utility that could be run from linux. The utilities that came with the live CD all require a mounted, read-only drive, and I can't mount the data partition (I just get an error).

[Shadow Wolf]

http://www.thecomputerparamedic.com/files/rc.iso

I don't know if you've resolved this already or not, but that's a link to an ISO that contains just the Windows XP recovery console. Provided nothing else on your computer is screwed up, you should be able to boot to that CD. Just download the ISO and use and ISO burning program to make the CD. Remember you can't just copy the file to a disc. If you have a CD burning program installed you can probably just double click the file and it'll automatically start the write dialog. Once you get into the recovery console, log ontp the Windows partition and type 'fixmbr.' That'll rewrite the master boot record. Hope that helps.

[Xerol Oplan]

Thanks, I'll give it a try.