Dell bad PBR need help

[Theory5]

hello, my friend called me up today to tell me that her computer is bringing up a Loading PBR for descriptor 2........Done

Bad PBR

 

she cant find the OS recovery disks and her computer is a Dell Demension 3000

could i just use a regular XP disk (oh and she says pressing F8 wont do anything) or does it have to be those dell recovery disks? is there another way to fix the Primary boot record? some third party software? please help me i know you guys can, thanks

-Theory

[alexander]

you would be soooo much better off with dell recovery cds.

 

if not tho, boot up to any xp installation CD, go into recovery console, run chkdsk /f (here you have lots of time totalk to your friend, or if she's more then a friend :hihi: ... just saying don't miss the opportunity) then fixboot then fixmbr.

 

reboot

 

if you are still struck with that error, i would make sure that you have the same version of install cds as the windows on her machine, reboot into cd and go through a repair installation. ideally here you would want to have the dell recovery cd, any dell recovery cd with the same OS that she used, because i dunno what dell does, but their cds in dell machines do not require any windows keys, and it's just a hacked windows install, so you don't worry if you have a dimension 4400 or a precision 690, windows install disks are windows install disks.

 

but yeah scan the disk and run fixboot and fixmbr and see what happens, we'll go from there do post back

[Theory5]

Ohh so i can use a regular OS disk, great!

[GAHD]

if you use a "regular" OS disk and need to completely reinstall, you may need to go navigate the horrific tangle of Dell's support pages for the system drivers. Dell has a way of using oddly specific hardware.

[alexander]

lets hope he can repair.... for his sake. You know what's even worse then dell for that? Compaq..... HP website seems to be running on Vista for a server platform...

[Theory5]

If i have to completely reinstall im just going to take the HDD to my house and copy it onto another HDD...... cause people seem to like their saved files and folders, its like a sickness :-P

[alexander]

sorry we couldn't help :thumbs_up

[Theory5]

it worked, but then i restarted the computer and it says now "cannot load operating system", is there a way to do this without reinstalling the operating system? or can i just reinstall XP in one certain partition?

when I do chkdsk it says there is one or more unrecoverable errors.

[freeztar]

How are you able to run chkdsk if you can't load the OS?

 

Anyhow, it sounds like a bad disc to me. You can try this:

UBCD for Windows

 

But obviously you will need to burn it on another machine. I haven't actually used this version yet, but the original UBCD worked great for me during my tech days. I'm sure this one is even better suited for your situation. I'm downloading it now to check it out.

 

Also, it might be good to check out ubuntu and/or gparted and use those to probe.

[alexander]

UBCD has a lot of neat tools, i do have quite a few problems with it, but over all it's a pretty good tool. Run HD check off of that, make sure it's not your drive, because as free said, it does sound like the hd is dying...

[Theory5]

I ran chkdsk through those Dell tools

yea the drive does run but when I hook it up to one of my computers it says it is not formated. WHen i ran the setup to install the OS just to see if it could dected the HDD it did. But it said "C:" was unformatted

And I did have a Damn small linux with me, so I was able to go online, but all the internet said was that it probably failed.

[freeztar]

Yeah, that's too bad. You might as well try to format it at this point and see if it will even do that, but in my experience, "No OS found" means dead disk, usually accompanied by a throttled/click-click sound. The fact that the HD is detected provides a spark of hope, but it could be a last breath situation for the drive.

[alexander]

yeah, i would say the disk is dead and order a new one...