How to fix MBR in Windows XP and Vista

Posted by Aseem on Monday, February 23rd 2009

23
Feb

What is the MBR? MBR stands for Master Boot Record and it’s the first sector of your hard drive that basically tells the BIOS where to look for the operating system on your computer.

If, for any reason, the MBR becomes damaged or corrupt, then the operating system will be unable to load. You will normally see error messages like:

Error loading operating system

Missing operating system

Invalid partition table

These messages are definitely not fun, especially if you are not familiar with computers. Most people would automatically assume their computers are dead! However, that’s not true. Being in IT myself, these errors are actually preferably to other types of Windows errors. Why?

Well, it’s actually fairly easy to fix the Master Boot Record in XP and Vista. All you have to do is load up the Recovery Console and run a simple command. All of your data, applications, settings, etc are still intact on the drive and once the MBR is fixed, the computer will load normally.

So how can you repair your damaged MBR? Here are the steps to follow:

1. First, restart your computer with the Windows XP setup disk in the CD drive. If you don’t have your original disk, borrow one or download a ISO image from a torrent site.

2. When prompted, boot from the CD drive by pressing any key. If Windows loads automatically, you will first have to enter the BIOS setup and change the order of the boot devices to start with the CD drive.

3. Once the setup loads, you will see the option to press R to repair a Windows installation.

4. Once the Recovery Console loads up, you will have to type in a number that corresponds to your Windows installation. This is normally just 1. Press Enter and then type in the Administrator password.

5. Now at the prompt, type in fixmbr. Your damaged MBR will now be replaced with a new master boot record and your computer should now be able to boot properly. Note that you may also want to run the fixboot command to repair the boot sector with a new one.

Also, make sure you only use these commands on a system with one operating system installed. If you have more than one operating system installed, fixmbr and fixboot could mess up everything.

Fix MBR in Vista

In Vista, the procedure to fix the master boot record is a bit different. You have to start up Vista in the Recovery Environment and then run the bootrec command. Here’s how.

1. First, load up the Windows Vista disc in your drive and press any key to boot from the disc.

2. Choose the language, time, currency, etc and click Next. Now click on Repair Your Computer.

3. Choose the operating system to repair and click Next. When the System Recovery Options dialog comes up, choose the Command Prompt.

4. Now type bootrec.exe and press Enter. This will rebuild the boot configuration data and hopefully fix your problem. You can also run the command with switches to fix just the master boot record (/fixmbr), the boot sector (/fixboot), or rebuild the entire BCD (/rebuildbcd).

If you are still having trouble with loading Windows, post a comment and I’ll see if I can help! Enjoy!

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49 Comments Already

Gregory Said,

March 6th, 2009 @5:46 am

Eh.. I’m getting “Element Not Found” errors on trying to fix server 08 with this method..

rahul Said,

March 11th, 2009 @3:27 am

There is no OS to select in the vista repair option. I’m directly getting the recovery console.

Art Klein Said,

May 12th, 2009 @8:38 pm

My HP desktop with Vista Home Premium didn’t come with a Vista installation disk. I want to fix the MBR (I got a “non-standard MBR” message when I tried to restore an earlier image with R-Drive Image). I tried one of the recommended rituals from Microsoft’s Knowledge Base to access the preinstalled recovery options, but I don’t seem to have those (no “Repair Computer” option listed in Safe Mode). How can I obtain those Vista recovery options? Thanks for your help.

Ikepopo Said,

June 2nd, 2009 @5:33 am

Waoh!!! That was great. I have tried all I could but could not fix my MBR under VISTA but your solution has helped me solve my problem.

Ryanred5 Said,

June 8th, 2009 @9:21 am

When I tried to do the “Fixmbr”, I got a big error message basically telling me I could lose everything on my drive.

What had I done wrong?

Thanks

ROCKY Said,

June 14th, 2009 @5:40 am

yeap, this article saved me a bunch of time as I have one physical drive with 2 primary partitions, vista/xp on them and somehow Norton (Symantec) bootmagic screwed up my MBR, I was almost at the point of deleting partitions and reinstall when came across this article, that saved me almost a week of work that I had done on both OS’s.

regards

djrnold Said,

June 24th, 2009 @3:23 pm

I followed your instruction on the Vista part. However, my problem is my drive default is pointing to x:\Sources. I believe this is where my Recovery CD is being read. Anyway, I typed the cmd. x:\sources>bootrec.exe, then a msg. came up giving me other commands such as /fixMbr, /FixBoot, /ScanOS, /RebuildBcd. I tried any of this on the x:\sources>c: /fixmbr, but the msg. says “The volume does not contain a recognized file system. Please make sure that all required file system drivers are loaded and the the volume is not corrupted.”
What should I do next? Please advise, thanks.

dead vista Said,

June 29th, 2009 @2:55 pm

i just bought a new hdd to install windows 7 on it. after installing and using windows 7 for a while, i felt like going back to vista for a moment.

i was too lazy to pop out the new hdd from the laptop to swap back the old hdd with vista on it, so i put the vista hdd in a external casing and tried to boot up my laptop from a ‘usb harddisk’ (that’s what my BIOS called it.)

when i push the power button, the screen showed the windows loading bar for around 2 seconds, then ‘poof!’ a blue screen flashes across and it came to a black screen with a blinking cursor on the top left corner.

I thought something bad had happened and got my lazy ass to pop that vista hdd back into the laptop. but all attempts to boot from that harddrive just ends up with the same black scree+blinking cursor.

HELP!?

skyso Said,

July 9th, 2009 @12:42 am

Hi Aseem.

I have the following problem: I screwed up my MBR and after that I tried to fix it with vista cd and Start Up repair. It repaired my mbr and then I logged into vista, but I lost my D partition with all my data. Actually I didnt lost my data, but this partition in computer management is white with blue frame and no description. When I go to right-click and choose properties, I cannot change drive letter and it refuse access with following message: “The operation faild to complete because the disk management console is not up to date…

I know that all my data are there, because I can see them with partition table doctor. After that I did what you wrote: fixmbr, fixboot, rebuildbcd, but without changes. Can you help me?
..skyso

Ej Said,

July 14th, 2009 @5:12 am

I type fixmbr and it says command is not recognized!

ferz Said,

July 18th, 2009 @4:49 pm

Thanx dude..you save me!
i know how to do it only in xp and i had a problem with windows 7!
thanx again for the info! You saved me

chandan singh Said,

July 20th, 2009 @1:32 pm

I intalled CentOS after installing XP professional on my laptop, after that i have deleted the CentOS partion…. and now when i am trying to reinstall xp on that box it doesn’t promt me for repair, clean, installing options, it just showing blank black screen on my monitor……

Please advise………!!!

kenny Said,

July 29th, 2009 @2:14 am

uhh well i am using windows vista and i have encountered this problem. i had a virus on my computer and now whenever i click on a file (ex. internet explorer,paint,google earth) a black screen appears(screen of death) is what they call it i think. and also when i tried to download stuff it never seems to work and it just goes black. can you please help me? also i have not tried this and i need help gettin into my disc because i do not kno where it is can you give me step-by-step instructions thank you, kenny

milky2507 Said,

July 30th, 2009 @2:03 am

I was formatting my hard drive on XP and put the Vista disk in by mistake and loaded Vista on top of XP. I have since deleted all partitions, created new partitions (C & D)) and loaded XP back on after formatting C drive. I am still getting the error in loading operating system even after running fixmbrand fixboot. I also had someone who gave it a try and returned my harddrive to as new condition, that didn’t work either. Could you plese help.
ps I have since reformatted and fixmbr and fixboot and still no joy.

ryansmithxvx Said,

August 19th, 2009 @2:28 pm

after running this repair, i’m encountering a 2-fold problem:

1 – when I boot from the CD and follow all of those instructions, it tells me there are no installations of windows to repair/restore to an earlier point. If I try startup repair, A-if i select the version of windows it finds, it says I don’t have the files necessary for it; B-if i just don’t select a version and continue without, it runs, says complete, then reboots and nothing is different.

If I try to do the complete system restore, it says there isn’t a driver to repair at all. When I do the command prompt features, any ‘fix’ options say they are completed and ask me to reboot. Any ‘rebuild’ or ’search’ options list 0 instances of windows installed.

2 – When I boot without the CD, startup tells me it needs to run chkdsk to repair windows (or less frequently it asks if I want to start in safe mood, due to a failed load the previous time), gets to windows where I type in my windows passphrase, and after I do, processes for about 5-10sec and reboots.

So basically I still can’t get to the point where I can do a system restore, the CD seems to have helped a bit, but I still can’t actually boot windows at all.

Any thoughts? If I just do a re-install from the CD, I’ll lose everything on my computer. And I’ll have to put in my windows key to authenticate right? I don’t know if I have it anymore.

Thanks so much,
Ryan

magicyte Said,

September 5th, 2009 @6:16 pm

VERY HELPFUL!!!!! I had Ubuntu on a dual-boot and really wanted to get rid of it, but deleted the partition only to find that GRUB was still running as the bootloader… Once I found this, I managed to figure out how to fix the master boot record. Thanks a ton!

matt Said,

September 14th, 2009 @9:46 am

Eh.. I’m getting “Element Not Found” errors on trying to fix server 08 with this method..need help

Mike D Said,

September 24th, 2009 @5:19 pm

First thank you for your posting, but what if the system does not read the drives due to a virus that removed the mbr? That is what happened to me and need assistance.

Thanks
Mike

poopface Said,

September 25th, 2009 @1:26 pm

Does rewriting / repairing the MBR or boot erase all data or make all contents of the harddrive inaccessible?

Majalah Said,

October 27th, 2009 @7:37 pm

Yes. finally i can remove my GRUB from my MBR. now I can log on to my vista smoothly.

niteskyye Said,

November 1st, 2009 @2:49 pm

I finally got to the prompt, typed all of the commands there and it said none of them were recognized as an internal or external command operable program or batch file

cinek Said,

November 3rd, 2009 @7:27 pm

GREAT i allmost destroyed my vista partition…but this tip helped me ! thx

BriDog Said,

November 8th, 2009 @1:50 am

I got a doosy for ya. If your still around. I got infected by a virus. It infected my MBR. Now, the Windows XP recovery console doesn’t even recognize the drive. HELP! Anyone?

Cori Said,

November 13th, 2009 @10:04 pm

After following instruction in this article, I can access my vista again. thanks for the article.

vishal Said,

November 23rd, 2009 @12:35 am

I have a pc with win xp pro sp1. It was infected with virus and I installed Regrun to remove them.

I uninstalled Regrun and installed SP2 on it.

Now I’m getting the following message:
“Windows could not start because the following is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM”

When I try to run FIXMBR using Recovery Console I get the followin message:
“This computer appears to have a non-standard or invalid master boot record.”

What’s wrong with my pc. Your help will be appreciated
Thanks.

cliff claven Said,

November 26th, 2009 @12:48 pm

BriDog::

I have the same problem exactly on my laptop. I was able to use ubuntu to boot from cd to access my data to safely remove anything important to me. Now I am trying to repair the MBR but I can’t find anything that works with linux or finding a program that can boot from the cdrom to repair the window xp MBR. I tried the recovery console thingy but it comes up with “no hard drive found” so that hoops me big time.

Cliff

Arnab Said,

November 27th, 2009 @10:55 pm

I have a DELL Inspiron 1545 Laptop with Windows XP SP2 installed in it.I was trying to format a drive using GParted tool. While doing so, I created a new partition table, by mistake. Now it is showing the entire 250GB as unallocated. I have not partitioned or formatted anything else. I guess I have deleted the MBR and the remaining part of the disk is still intact. Am i right? If so, will the solution provided in this article work? If not, what would have happened? Kindly suggest me a solution.

When i switch on the laptop, i get the following error:

“No bootable devices–strike F1 to try reboot, F2 for setup utility.Press F5 to run on board diagnostics”

Smiling Said,

December 6th, 2009 @7:27 am

Quote “Also, make sure you only use these commands on a system with one operating system installed. If you have more than one operating system installed, fixmbr and fix boot could mess up everything.”

I disagree. I have used these commands on dual-boot systems, and providing you are careful to select the correct operating system you wish to modify, there should be no problems.

DISCLAIMER

(Users own experience and opinion. Offered without warranty or assumption of responsibility or liability for any injury, loss or damage incurred as a result of any use or reliance upon the information.)

AMS Said,

December 12th, 2009 @6:42 pm

I don’t remember setting any password but it keeps asking me to “Type the Administrator password:” What can I do???

Stan Said,

December 14th, 2009 @12:28 am

I am about to do this on a system with XP and Ubuntu, to remove an old Ubuntu (to reinstall a newer version on a new second hard drive). Here is what I know (will report back on my disaster/success later): Ubuntu’s GRUB is in the MBR, which is at the start of the first partition*, but it points to data in the Ubuntu partition.

So don’t delete Ubuntu while GRUB is still there, it may get confused. Use the procedure above to “fix” the MBR back to XP-only. It will no longer look for the Linux partition (which will still be there) and will boot straight to XP. (You can install a driver called ext2IFS so that XP can see the Linux partition, if you want.)

Then boot Linux from a live CD and used gParted to remove the Linux partitions. This opens up the space for the next step. Reboot into XP and use EASUS Partition Master (free) to stretch the XP partition into the new empty space, or create a second FAT or NTFS partition there if you prefer. (Maybe Partition Master can remove the Linux partition, but it doesn’t say so, and I read elsewhere about using gParted to do it.)

Reboot to test that all is well for XP. For me, I will then pull the jumper on the drive, making it a “slave” and put it on the other drive, making it “master.” (If I rebooted then, it would say “no operating system found.”) Then, rebooting with the new Ubuntu CD, I will tell it to install on the main drive (the new master). It should notice the XP on the other drive and let me include it on the bootup list.

Most important, GRUB will not write anything on the slave drive, but it will still let me choose which OS to fire up on boot. (GRUB can trick XP into thinking it’s by itself on the master drive when it is actually on the slave.) Then if I decide to lose Linux later, all I have to do is move the jumper back to the XP drive. XP will be master again with its own native MBR, nothing to patch.

*I have read that some computer makers put a hidden partition before the system one, I forget why, but that can cause the errors some have mentioned in previous posts. The MBR has to know to look past that partition to the system one. Sorry, I don’t know the fix, keep googling.

dd4life Said,

December 14th, 2009 @11:31 pm

I have an external drive that MBR has been corrupted. Windows 2000 has diskprobe, still not accessible. How would I run fixmbr or fixboot on this drive. I have a windows 2k disk and an xp disk.

But don’t want to accidentally mess up the main hard drive. Does windows 2k have the same fixboot / fixmbr capability? Send me an email please and post here if you can.

TIA

Stan Said,

December 20th, 2009 @5:32 pm

Here is my success story. No disaster. I booted from the XP CD as described above and did fixmbr only. Then I rebooted and it found XP directly and started up normally. No need for fixboot. Then I started Partition Master, and taking a chance, deleted the Linux partitions (after copying off files I wanted to keep, using ext2IFS). Then I stretched the XP partition back to the whole drive.

It asked for reboot, and on restart it did about 10-15 minutes of “moving files.” Apparently it’s a good program, everything was OK on boot completion. The new hard drive was unformatted. Power off, I swapped the jumper, making it master, and booted the Xubuntu CD. After starting a partitioning program (maybe gParted, it didn’t say) I told it to make /, swap, and /home partitions on the new drive, then install Linux. It installed GRUB to the new master and incidentally mentioned XP was found on the other drive. I told it to include XP on the boot menu.

When done I rebooted, and there was GRUB’s menu, ugly black and white, but it booted into Xubuntu fine. It’s actually GRUB2 and I had to learn a few things to get it pretty looking and to set XP as the default choice, but finally got that done. I looked at the menu code for booting XP and it looked like it should work (fooling XP into thinking it was on the master). And it did! All is well, except Xubuntu 9.10 uses ext4 filesystem, and ext2IFS doesn’t see it. So I can’t look into the Linux drive from XP. Maybe later.
“Your results may vary.”

dc2be Said,

January 4th, 2010 @1:11 pm

I have had this problem on a dell vostro 1500 with win xp home edition. Both fixboot and fix mbr do not correct my problem. Both Fixboot and Fix mbr run fine and after they complete I exit and reboot my system but I keep getting a blue screen and even if I start in safe mode it will not load windows. I am going to try and get a 2.5 3.5 convereter and try and hook up the hd to my desktop as an additional hd drive to access the data on it, then I will format the laptop drive and reinstall it. I don’t know what else to try, any suggestions??

Alfonso FR Said,

January 4th, 2010 @2:33 pm

I have the same problem as djrnold. When I try to rebuilbcd, an installation is found, but when answering to add it to the boot list, i get a message saying that the filesystem is not recognized. ¿Can anyone help me?

I will tell you the history: this is a multiboot PC with several hard disks on it. I had a previous installation of windows vista on (hd0,0) that was not in use, a new installation of vista on (hd2,0) that was in use, and an opensuse installation on (hd1,0) that I installed after the Vista. I installed GRUB from opensuse and modified my ‘menu.lst’ so that it pointed to (hd0,0) in order for it to find the new Vista at (hd1,0). I had to do that for it to work, because if the GRUB list item pointed to where the Vista actually was (hd1,0) I could not boot it. That was all working well and I could boot both systems.

But then I installed a debian linux on (hd0,0) with a swap partition on (hd0,1) and obviously, I had to format both partitions in linux format (ext3 and swap). When later asked if I wanted to install GRUB, I did not want to overwrite the Vista MBR at (hd0,0), so I choose it to be installed at (hd0,1). Then I could not boot any system anymore. When I run rebuildbcd from the Vista DVD, it does not recognize the ext3 filesystem (even when it is opensource). However, it offers the possibility to load a driver (I do not know how to do this).

I am thinking of getting rid of my latter debian installation, then formatting (hd0,0) into ntfs or fat32, and finally running rebuildbcd again to see if I can then boot my Vista OS. Then of course, I would have to reconfigure my menu.lst for opensuse and to reinstall debian. Whatever… any incoming help in the very short term will be greatly appreciated

Robert Said,

January 21st, 2010 @11:38 pm

I build/work/repair my own pc’s and just recently I came across a problem I have never encountered. I am hoping you may be able to help or at least guide me in the right direction so that this never happens again.

My problem is when I recenlty reformatted a pc I noticed the MBR was on the C drive while the OS was on the E drive. Normally this would not be a problem but the E drive is just a partitioned drive that is used for storage. The physical drive is a 500Gb Hdd that I have partitioned with 50 Gb going to the C dr. for the OS & apps., and the rest is the E dr. that is used for strorage.

Is it possible to just move or copy the MBR to the propper drive and then delete ther original file on the E dr.? Or would I have to reformat and re-install the OS?

woolbe Said,

January 23rd, 2010 @2:31 pm

For the most part, everyone appears to have the same problem. Unfortunately, as someone mentioned above, a trojan has written itself into CMOS/BIOS in a format not recognized by Windows operating systems.

I managed once to penetrate this first small partition (about 100 meg) and received a message that the partition was not recognized. It then locked me out. One must be careful in that this trojan varient will immediately infect all other hard drives (primary partitions) in the very same manner not to mention floppy and burnt CDs.

Also, once you detect this trojan, any software you attempt to install on your machine will be either unusable or the trojan wiill rootkit the kernal and tell you everything is fine. Even the MS tools mentioned above will not work because the trojan, rootkit or whatever you want to call it, will permanently delete any permissions on that hard drive.

So, I know where and what it is, the issue is to remove it and the original boot record from the hard drive, flash the bios/cmos and attempt a low level format. Because the malware sits in a partition Windows fails to recognize, you will probably not be able to remove it. Did I mention that all data will be lost regardless of the outcome. Wish me luck in removing this piece of malware.

AGAIN, do not attach any more hard drives as they will be infected also. If you had more than one…….it’s double trouble. If I figure it out I’ll let you know but don’t waste money on software that says it can remove all partitions; it can only remove partitions it recognizes.

woolbe

Paul-Gab Said,

January 28th, 2010 @10:27 am

This information helped me a lot! I was able to fix the MBR and start up my Windows PC. Thanks very much!

j360 Said,

February 5th, 2010 @8:05 pm

This is a good article, but it’s not very helpful in some cases. I’ve realized some computers like HP (windows vista/7) give the option to create a recovery disk since they don’t provide you with OS disc and plus you can create only one set of recovery disks. The recovery disk’s only options are restore point and restore your computer to its original factor form, no command prompt. I broke my computer but i fixed it using different methods. I know there are different tools and methods out there but there are people who do’t know much about computers which makes this article not very helpful for them.

helderam Said,

February 27th, 2010 @8:59 am

Hello,

How to recover MBR without installation disk ?

Michael Said,

March 1st, 2010 @2:32 pm

Hi, I just got the blue screen of death this morning when I tried booting my windows xp sp3 pc. I’ve tried chkdsk /r, fixboot, and fixmbr. Also, it won’t run under safe mode. I don’t know what else to do. Please help.

none Said,

March 11th, 2010 @8:09 pm

this doesn’t help much when you CANT get into recovery console BECAUSE your MBR is messed up. Isn’t Windows beautiful?

emailwedgy Said,

March 19th, 2010 @6:15 pm

Dude, you rock. What a simple fix.

MY PC was an ex-dual boot xp/ubuntu. Following XP crashing, I took off ubuntu for lack of use, then couldn’t get it to run up on that hard drive (needed to have a spare installed in the primary slot. Fixmbr allowed me to go back to one hdd and stopped my xp disc hanging while “Inspecting your computer’s hardware”. One short install later all is well

Luv ya work.

Phil

the_answer Said,

March 31st, 2010 @9:25 am

Hi Aseem,

first of all thanks for your detailled discription how to solve that issue. As mentioned in the steps above, I could repair my problem (“Missing operating system on Win7-Boot”) with bootrec.exe and fixmbr + fixboot.

But the problem now is that my Win partition was reset, that means that all my data saved to that partition was deleted. Weird is that some data is still available, e. g. some documents I moved some days ago to the recycle bin. Other data (most important my Outlook files) are not there any more. Do you have any suggestion how I could restore my partition?

btw: I had the problem after MS latest updates…

xman Said,

April 15th, 2010 @3:20 pm

This article is oblivious to the fact over 90% of systems shipped don’t come with a disk capable of MBR or Bootloader repair..

Solution for the masses who don’t have a disc to repair them, and don’t want to spend hundreds acquiring one: SuperGRUB or EasyBCD based on ISO image.

This is real bob the technician grade.

OZRAN411 Said,

May 13th, 2010 @2:04 pm

after running this repair, i’m encountering :

when I boot from the CD and follow all of those instructions, it tells me there are no installations of windows to repair/restore to an earlier point. If I try startup repair, A-if i select the version of windows it finds, it says I don’t have the files necessary for it; B-if i just don’t select a version and continue without, it runs, says complete, then reboots and nothing is different.

So basically I still can’t get to the point where I can do a system restore, the CD seems to have helped a bit, but I still can’t actually boot windows at all.

Any thoughts? If I just do a re-install from the CD, I’ll lose everything on my computer. And I’ll have to put in my windows key to authenticate right? I don’t know if I have it anymore.

Argo Said,

May 17th, 2010 @7:40 am

I think the solution given here to MBR error is very useful and help me solve this problem on my old computer to which I didn’t wanted to format as it contained some important data which i need to move to new computer.