HD won't boot after clean OS installs. Unfixable MBR?
Experience: I'm computer savvy (C++ programmer) and read instructions before I do things, but am still a newbie to Linux and dual-booting.
Hardware:
Mobo: A7N8X-E
CPU: AMD Althon XP 2500+
RAM: 512MB DDR PC3200 x2
Video: ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
Hard Drive: 120GB Western Digital
Initial setup:
Windows XP Pro on a maximum-sized, NTFS formatted partition. No other OS, everything worked fine.
I guess this isn't Linux-specific since the problem started before Linux was involved, but it seems like a problem you guys would know more about than windows people.
I wanted to dual-boot (on one HD) Fedora Core 3 as my main OS, with XP still there in case I needed to run a program that didn't work in Linux (and so I can test Win32 ports of my projects). I spent an hour or so reading up on how to do it correctly, and it seemed that using PartitionMagic was the best way to resize the XP partition without losing data, so I got the program and went through the steps to resize it, but after applying the resize, it showed up exactly how it was before. That led me to believe it did nothing, but apparently I missed something in the instructions, because the next time I rebooted, I got an "Invalid system disk..." error (I didn't make any other changes or create/delete files after the resize and before the reboot). The other painfully noticable change was that POST, "Verifying DMI Pool data....", and anything else that had to probe the HD was taking MUCH longer than normal (it takes 12 minutes to get to the first menu on the XP cd, assuming it gets that far). When I got into the XP recovery console, I found that the partition was still there, full size, and the data was fine, but BIOS still wouldn't boot from it. I tried fixmbr at multiple times, but it didn't appear to do anything since it said I have an invalid MBR every time I ran it. I figured a clean XP install would be able to fix it, so I deleted the partition, recreated it, formatted, and started the XP install to find the problem was still there. After it copies the install files to the HD and restarts, it still won't boot from the HD (BIOS looks there before the CD-ROM) and goes back into the CD setup. The same thing happens with Fedora, the CD will have no problem finding the HD or creating the partitions or installing the OS (using GRUB as the boot loader on the MBR (XP had been wiped off first)), but nothing would boot from the HD. I've tried reinstalling GRUB from the rescue console, but it didn't make any difference. The HD is only 3 years old and I've never had any problems with it before, so I don't think it's going bad.
Right now, I'm running a live SantaFe (a probably unrelated problem, but I can only get it to run using Vesa X), but I'm too new to linux to know how to use it to help find/fix the problem. Anyone know what might be wrong and what I can do to make the HD bootable again? (all the data was backed up before, so I don't care about recovering anything) I haven't tried fdisk /mbr from a Win98 startup disk, I don't know if that can do something fixmbr can't, but I don't have a single functional floppy disk or blank CD left, so I can't try it out yet.
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