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SDBrooks

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MBR on XP Pro

Hi All,

Situation - Failed MBR on windows XP Professional

I have a Production PC (Manufacturing equipment controller) with Windows XP Pro that resides inside a turret (yes, this pc spins in circles 23 hours a day). Anyway, it's a vital piece of equipment for our manufacturing line. About every 18 months we have hard drive failures that lead to disassembly of the equipment to remove the PC and change the hard drive out. I keep 2 spares (imaged) at all times for just this problem.

Recently (this weekend due to our Ice Storm that blew out power repeatedly) we lost the drive in the middle of production. I removed the PC and swapped the drive so we could continue to run. I have just pulled up the hard drive on my PC (Windows 7) to check its status and it seems fine.... My guess is the MBR was corrupted from the repeated failures from power.

So, Is it possible to reconstruct the MBR in this drive as a it's a slave drive on my machine currently? If so, what file am I looking for to edit?
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Santosh Gupta

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Wow, 3 (pretty much identical) answers in 26 seconds :)
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SDBrooks

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thanks for the input.... very valid points ... however as I said, this is a production machine... it has a drive in it now that's fresh. We do not have another machine like this anywhere.. and would have to be ordered from the equipment manufacturer.

So, I don't have a "machine to load this drive to and run the fixboot/fixmbr: commands.

I have the drive... set a slave drive on my Win7 workstation. I simply need to edit the mbr record and put back on the shelf as "Spare 3".

Help here is appreciated. I am going to hold this disk for a few days before reimaging the disk as its checked out fine and I feel confident with was simply a corrupt mbr. But to know how to repair these disk "Offline" rather than hold the production up is a better scenario.

thanks again
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ok, ill give it shot.. I thought the MBR was hard independent
Have you thought about installing an SSD drive to save the constant trips to replace/fix the hard disk?  A spinning disk is not a good thing to have in this environment.. I'd be curious as to the amount of G forces involved here..
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Cool.. thanks all. Never tried to rebuild MBR outside of the actual machine. I thought it WS mb dependent. Guess not. Thanks again