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HyperPhae

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Unable to read boot sector in drive c:

Recently I got the Junkie virus on my computer. The first time I ran F-Prot on it, I was told that Junkie was now cleared from my Master Boot Record. However, since my .com files were already corrupted (and I forgot to make a startup disk in Win95), I reformmated my HD. First, Fdisk was run, then "format c:" was done after booting up from the A: drive. Ok..everything seemed ok. So I installed Win95 and Office97 and lots of other stuff. Finally, I ran F-Prot (v2.27) just to check that everything was in order. However, just when it was ready to Scan MBR...an error message popped up and said "Unable to read boot sector in drive c: " So, its kinda weird that I was able to work with my computer and then be told later by F-Prot that my boot sectors in my HD were unreadable. I don't think that its F-Prot fault. However, I hope someone can shed some light on this anomaly. Please tell me what I can do to make my MBR readable again.
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Voodoo
It sounds like it may be using the backup copy of your MBR to get things working. I would first run a disk checker like scandisk to see if there are any physical ailments with the drive, and then see what it reports back.

Something else you may wish to try is the dos command:

fdisk /MBR

For more information, go to:

http://www4.pc.ibm.com/aptips/3fa2_51a.html

Hope this helps...

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HyperPhae

ASKER

I tried using Scandisk on my HD already. But the darn program reported that nothing was wrong. =( If I ran fdisk /mbr now, won't I lose everything on my HD? Hmmm...shucks. Thanks for trying Voodoo. =)
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j2
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fdisk /MBR is _non_destructive.
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HyperPhae

ASKER

umm...what if my mbr is presently ok and i dont know for sure, but i'm just calling a false alarm? and if i run fdisk /mbr on it now, will it damage my "OK" mbr? thanks for trying J2 =)
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j2
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HyperPhae

ASKER

Thanks for all the info on fdisk and the mbr J2. I hope you didn't have to go to too much trouble for me. Thanks again. My last question is, can you tell me a little about the partition table, its purpose and what it does, how I can check that it is ok. =)
pls email tyler@playful.com