[Gllug] Extremely strange disk imaging problem.

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

On 20/01/11 17:40, John Edwards wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 05:32:20PM +0000, david at gbenet.com wrote:
>> Windows 2000 Pro does prevent you from booting from a CD or DVD - and the only way to get
>> rid of Windows 2000 Pro is to delete the MBR.
>>
>> In fact though you can set your order of boot in the BIOS this is ignored. I have installed
>> Windows 2000 Pro about 6 times - all on laptops all with the BIOS to boot from the CD or DVD
>> drive and all fail to boot. I've used DFSee to delete the MBR - success!
> What CD were you trying to boot?
>
> No sane BIOS should be reading the hard disk MBR before deciding
> whether to boot from a CD, but the software on the CD itself might.
>
>
>
>
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Indeed windows xp install disks do this before even displaying a single
character onscreen! The upshot is that a corrupt MBR can completely hang
a windows disk without any indication that it's started to load - all
you get is a plain black screen with a single flashing cursor - helpful!
Deleting the MBR from a linux live CD does the trick, then the windows
disk will boot and you can do fixmbr.

BTW: The problem persists after zeroing the entire disk, ergo tis not
the MBR at fault (or not ONLY the MBR at fault). I would seriously hope
that a computers BIOS would have a way of determining the number of
blocks available on a disk without recourse to reading that value from
its MBR - there would be so many things wrong with that if it did :/

Roger.
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