I have a 120gb Western Digital internal drive and it looks like the master
boot record may be corrupt. It is being used as the slave drive. When I
click on it in Windows XP Home it asks me if I want to format the drive.
I have a 120gb Western Digital internal drive and it looks like the
master boot record may be corrupt. It is being used as the slave
drive. When I click on it in Windows XP Home it asks me if I want to
format the drive.
When you click on it WHERE? In Explorer? Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc)? Only the first physical drive in scanned order by the BIOS is used to read its MBR. The MBR (sector 0) on the hard drive is not contained within any partition. Did you perhaps mean the boot sector (first sector) of the *partition* containing an install of an OS? Is "asks me if I want to format" the only message you get? That's the exact message? There is no error message? What happens if you go into Disk Management and use the Action -> Rescan menu?
I used the software Get Data Back and managed to recovery everything. Very
lucky.
Sanbar said:
I have a 120gb Western Digital internal drive and it looks like the
master boot record may be corrupt. It is being used as the slave
drive. When I click on it in Windows XP Home it asks me if I want to
format the drive.
When you click on it WHERE? In Explorer? Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc)?
Only the first physical drive in scanned order by the BIOS is used to read
its MBR. The MBR (sector 0) on the hard drive is not contained within any
partition. Did you perhaps mean the boot sector (first sector) of the
*partition* containing an install of an OS? Is "asks me if I want to
format" the only message you get? That's the exact message? There is no
error message? What happens if you go into Disk Management and use the
Action -> Rescan menu?
The boot record only matters if you are booting to it. It is just a text
file and has nothing to do with whether the drive is good. If you are
booting to another drive and the Western Digital is a slave you should not
be getting questions about formating it. Go into bios and see if the drive
is automatically recognized. If it is recognized in bios then it should be
good. Now if your boot record is corrupted on the master drive then you
might have problems booting but since you are describing the slave drive
this should not be the case about that drive.