Lanman wrote:
Never let it be said that I don't bring interesting problems to the list! This time, the problem makes no sense, unless someone has written a boot-sector virus and included it on the Mandrake 10.1 Community CD's.I have seen this before when you do not have a primary partition marked as active. Now, the install program should have done this, but in case it didn't, boot up in the rescue mode, and use fdisk to take a look at the drive. You should have one partition marked as active, or boot - depending on what version of fdisk you are using. (I like cfdisk, but I don't know if it is even included with MDK...)
One of my systems has an Asus P4S800 motherboard running an Intel P4-2.8Ghz HT CPU and 512MB's of DDR 400 ram onboard. I've had 10.1 installed and running flawlessly on it for some time now, but the hard drive (a refurbished generic 20GB ATA100 drive) was showing CRC errors,so I tossed it and installed a new (not refurbished) drive in it's place.
The install went off without a hitch. Lilo displayed the kernel choices for a default (Linux-only) install. Upon rebooting, I was surprised to get this warning;
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER.
Thinking I had a problem with Lilo, I rebooted with the first CD and went into rescue mode, where I re-entered the Lilo config and rebooted.
I received the same error, so using a Windows98 CD, I fdisked the master boot record, or I should say, I tried to update the MBR. Instead, I received an error which stated that the MBR was NOT updated.
After a quick search at Maxtor's support site, I downloaded powermax and did a full, zero-fill format of the drive, and tried to reformat the drive and to fdisk the MBR, but received the same error.
The BIOS on this board doesn't have anything regarding Virus protection in the menu, and even though I've redone the hard drive using utilities from CD's, I'm still getting the same errors. Either I can't fdisk the MBR, or I can't boot the drive.
Has anyone ever sen this problem? The system is fully compatible with Linux and was running 10.1 (and 10.0 before that) with another drive (now in the garbage and long gone), so the only thing that makes sense is that I've got a virus on the motherboard which is reinfecting the MBR each time I re-install.
I've downloaded several programs which are capable of repairing the MBR and they haven't helped at all. I've installed another new drive and had the exact same results.
Does anyone have any suggestions or helpful advice? This is just plain weird and I'm running out of ideas so I'd appreciate any help the list can offer.
TIA
Lanman Registered Linux User #190712
Mikkel
Mikkel; Fdisk showed that the first partition (/dev/hda1) was the boot partition and everything looked fine. This is very strange since the system was fine before I had to change the drive. Even after updating the BIOS a few times the problem is still here.
Go Figure!
-- Lanman Registered Linux User #190712
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