I had opensuse installed and for several reasons needed to go back to Windows XP on that box. When I went to reinstall Windows I noticed something I’ve never seen before, 2 MBRs. Not 2 different partitions. I’ve tried FDISK /MBR and DBAN with no success.
My main question is how do I get rid of the 30MB MBR that opensuse created. My second question is why on earth would opensuse create a new MBR? It is the best linux distro that I’ve used and I plan on using it again in the future, but not if it’s going to screw up my HDD and cause me headaches.
What you may be seeing is that Grub can be loaded from different places
including the MBR or (as I recall) a partition ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_GRUB ) so while you may be using DBAN
on a certain part of the drive this may still be missed if you don’t get
all of it. If you are getting all of it, when perhaps DBAN is insane or
you are loading Grub from another drive. If ‘fdisk /mbr’ has not
managed to get you back to normal then there is probably a Grub install
in a partition somewhere.
Good luck.
tom9200 wrote:
> I had opensuse installed and for several reasons needed to go back to
> Windows XP on that box. When I went to reinstall Windows I noticed
> something I’ve never seen before, 2 MBRs. Not 2 different partitions.
> I’ve tried FDISK /MBR and DBAN with no success.
>
> My main question is how do I get rid of the 30MB MBR that opensuse
> created. My second question is why on earth would opensuse create a new
> MBR? It is the best linux distro that I’ve used and I plan on using it
> again in the future, but not if it’s going to screw up my HDD and cause
> me headaches.
>
>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
As noted by ab, you’re misinterpreting the options that are listed to you as MBRs. Never mind. The command “fdisk /mbr” generally only works from dos, windows 95/98/me install media, not from 2000 or XP or vista install media. For XP install media you have to use command “fixmbr”. If after running fixmbr, the windows xp will still not boot, then you probably need to make the partition containing the windows bootloader files (e.g. boot.ini) – to make it the active partition again.
Ok, maybe a picture will help explain what I’m obviously not explaining very well. I ran fdisk /mbr from DOS because I know it can’t be run from the XP install disc. I also tried fixmbr (from the XP disc) with no success. There are NO partitions on the drive, but there are still 2 lines indicating 1 MBR of 30MB and the 2nd MBR for the rest of the drive space. There is only 1 drive in the system. If there’s another explanation I’m all ears, but from what I’m seeing there is not.
The highlighted line says “Unpartitioned space 24 MB”
The report is certainly incorrect; there is, and always has been, only 1 MBR on a PC and it’s the first 512 bytes.
The only time I’ve seen something like this (and I’ve been in this racket a long time) is when a drive overlay is installed. Got one of those, by chance?
Otherwise, the next probability is there is something in the partition table that is confusing XP setup. That could have happened if you used DOS fdisk; it can’t handle the geometries.
If you just delete those “partitions” in setup and let it start with unallocated space, it will re-write the table from scratch.