On Sat, 2004-11-20 at 11:52, 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.
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
That just happened to me (on 10.0 though) and I had to make the /boot partition "ACTIVE' using Partition Magic...after that, it was all downhill (er, uphill)
-- stephen kuhn
Thanks Stephen but I've never used Partition Magic, so I don't have it lying around to try your suggestion. It would be nice if there was a utility I could use to completely reformat or erase the MBR, especially if it actually worked! None of the ones I downloaded were able to fix it and neither were the anti-virus apps.
I'm tempted to replace the m/board in case that's the problem. I'm wondering if it might be the IDE controller or something. It might also explain the drive (CRC errors) I had on the other drive.
Maybe fate is trying to tell me that it's finally time for that 4 CPU Tyan board with 4 fast Xeon's and a few Gig's of DDR ram. Jeesh! The things I do just to run a "Solitaire" Game server! Grin!
-- Lanman Registered Linux User #190712
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