I have an HP Pavilion DV9912nr laptop that was running fine until this week's Patch Tuesday when something within those files or the update corrupted my Master Boot Record (MBR).  The drive is intact and I have validated with all my directories and files are there via a Ubuntu Live CD.  Unfortunately, I can't get the laptop to boot up because because it cannot read sector 0.  I have spent a whole lot of time trying to figure out how to get to an FDisk prompt the execute Fdisk /MBR or a FIXMBR command but for the life of me I can't figure out how to make that happen.  I have backup but from where I am at now I can't even reformat the drive to restore for my system backup.  Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can fix this problem?  Either by reformating somehow.  Or, by telling me how or where I can run the FIXMBR command to resolve the corrupted MBR?  Thanks for listening, Jim Baldwin

The physical drive is fine as I am able to view directories, folders, and files via ubuntu. Several hard drive utilities could find no physical issues with the drive.  The Pavilion came with Vista 32 installed.  Unfortunately, there were no system, repair, or restore disks included.  The laptop has a separate partition that contains all the restore files.  In as much as the MBR was bad I had no access to the files in that partition either.  I only had what I created when I first got the laptop and the very first of thr three recovery disk when booted indicated I needed Vista installation disks to proceed.  Unless I can find and execute a version of fDisk I have no tools to restart from scratch.  If I could just issue the fDisk command with the /MBR switch fDisk should be able to rebuild/repair the MBR.  Without fDisk to reformat the drive I can't launch my True Image backup rescue disk.  If you have any information on the who, what, where, and how I can reformat a none responding drive, I would surely appreaciate any information you can provide.  As far as I can tell, none of the dozen or so of my bootable recovery/repair disks can assist me with a reformat of any kind.  All those programs simply validate my sector 0 was corrupted and provided no help or information on what to do to fix the problem.  I would have thought a corrupted MBR would be fairly common and any number of recovery/repair disks out in the world would figure a quick 1-2-3 process to execute an FIXMBR command.  Such a disk may very well be out there.  I just haven't found it.

The good news is that I have fixed my corrupted MBR.  As a last resort I ran my WinXP Pro install disk that let me get into the WinXP Pro Recovery Console.  That enabled me to run the FIXMBR command from the system prompt.  Despite being an old WinXP Pro disk the MBR must be generic enough to not make a difference to whatever OS was running.  A reboot enabled the Patch Tuesday files to complete their install and with yet another restart my HP Pavilion is back to working as if nothing had ever happened.

For future reference, I would still appreciate any information that would enabled me to reformat my drive when nothing else I could find would work.

Thank You for your response, Jim Baldwin

You can use another WinVista/7 install disk to make the repair. When it gets to the point where it gives you the "Install Now" button under that are the options to repair the boot sequence.

asi said:

J.R.  Thanks for your offer.  Once I got the drive working I was able to create a recovery disk which I have added to my collection of recovery resources.