Norton Disk Doctor tells me my boot drive is not a bootable?

Archive
1

I installed NSW 12 and decided to run NDD and it immediately popped up a message telling me my boot drive's MBR is corrupt and that I won't be able to boot unless I repair it.  Since I've been booting find (including after that message popped up) I told NDD no and then uninstalled it so I don't accidently "repair" my working drive.

 

Why is it telling me my boot drive is corrupt when it works fine?

I will mention that my laptop is a DELL so it does have a recovery program that can be triggered when booting up.  Is that why?

2

I’ve just installed and had the same - hopefully someone can answer it. In the meantime I’m going to keep saying ‘No’ as well.

3

Yeah. Its because of the Dell Recovery or Utility partition. The MBR is modified to make your Dell Recovery partition as active partition. Norton Disk Doctor checks for MBR as well as Partition table along with disk errors. If you do not want to make changes to MBR, you can ignore the message.

 

--Vinod

4

 Mine’s not a Dell though, it’s a Novatech supplied bare and I installed from scratch so I know everything that’s on it and certainly no hidden partitions.

5

What version of Windows do you have?  If Vista, what flavor?  Is this a 64 bit version of Windows? 

Use PartinNT

 

ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/PartInNT.zip

 

Check your MBR and partition tables.  Chances are it wasn't a completely clean drive.

 

6

 Very useful tool - thanks :

 

 

and yet :

 

 

ps: Disk 3 is a USB external

 

 

Message Edited by Kremmen on 01-25-2009 06:53 AM
7

What operating system do you have?  What is on your C and D partition?  How did you create these partitions?

For Disk 1 it looks like you have a FAT and NTFS partition in the same location.  This seems to center around your D partition. 

 

 

8

Don't know if it was you or somwhere else that pointed to this but it's a wonderful explanation of the Dell Recovery Partition setup:

 

Inside the Dell PC Restore Partition

An Exploration by Dan Goodell

 

HP and Averatec have hidden recovery partitions too I know but whether they modify in the same way I do not know.

9

It's a Novatech machine with XP Home.

 

I installed it from scratch with a OEM XP CD.

 

The partitions were all setup via PartitionMagic 8.05 and are all NTFS (which is confirmed by other utilities as well).

 

C:\ is my main Windows partition and D:\ is just a Data partition.

10

Looks like there might have been a problem in how you set up the D partition.  Did you first resize C:\ and then create D: as a new partition or did you first create an extended parition and put a new logical partition there?  The problem looks like it’s from how the extended partition was set up.  Since you have partition magic, check the partitions for errors.  You might need to remove and rebuild the D: partition.

11

Thanks

 

I set it up some years ago when I first got the PC and I can't remember whether I did it via the XP installation CD or via PM after the installation.

 

It's just a simple Data partition so I'll offload it, remove it and rebuild it.

 

Appologies for the gaps between replies - short of time.

12

More than likely it was with Partition Magic.  Let me know if the partition rebuild resolves matters.

 

13

D Partition removed

Partiton Magic forced reboot and applied changes and the error is still there.

I think I will have to live with this which is no problem as I seem to have no problems.

Message Edited by Kremmen on 01-31-2009 06:35 AM
Message Edited by Kremmen on 01-31-2009 06:37 AM
Message Edited by Kremmen on 01-31-2009 06:50 AM