Tips used for Top Tips come from the ExtremeTech forum and are written by our community.
Question from THEWIZ
“How can you repair a bad patitition table ,formating hard drive will not do it .Use IBM disk it will not erase the boot paratition . Is there anyway to repair it ? “
Answer from waynesworld
“If your sure your hard drive is good and dont mind losing whatevers on the disk, If Anything worth saving (?) I would fdisk the whole Tomata and start from scratch. Remember that with multiple OS booting & windows you have to load them in order of Antiquity. The oldest one first; 98 then 2K then XP.
The only way I know how to truly check a Hard Drive and mark bad sectors is with low level formatting tools. Your drives maker may have a LLF floppy or CD image you can download and copy. If your drive is 10 GBs or more, be prepared for a LONNNNGGG night! LLF takes a while.
fdisk utilities and various set up images can be gotten here to put on Z floppies & you can try to fixmbr but sounds like a job for fdisk.
http://www.drd.dyndns.org/index2.html”
Answer from Gill_Boyd
“Without knowing your O/S – Old DOS way = fdisk /mbr
OR… Install the HD in question slaved to another boot HD, scan it, clean it and then fdisk it!”
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