MBR removal

[nd4spdsho]

Hey everyone...I'm wondering if the fdisk /mbr command will destroy data on the hard drive, other than the MBR. I need to remove the MBR so I can use the drives as storage without my PC consantly looking for an OS on these drives. Can anyone give some pointers?

Thanks in advance

 

[edfair]

It will not destroy any data, it only rewrites the MBR.

Could it be that you needed to create the partition only and not format the drive?

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[Blujacket]

Also, the Master Boot Record does not make the drive bootable by itself, also requires SYS C: which is done when booted to a floppy after formatting the drive [unless the full Operating System is installed].

Some reading about the MBR:

http://support.microsoft.com/defaul...pport/kb/articles/Q69/0/13.ASP&NoWebContent=1

 

[wolluf]

nd4spdsho - you can't remove mbr if you want to use drives for storage - it contains the partition table (as Ed days, fdisk /mbr rewrites it, doesn't remove).

Also - PC looks for a bootable (active) partition on first (as defined in the bios) & subsequent (if first doesn't have one) hard drives. So, if these are storage drives, presumably not 1st drive - machine would only try booting from them if no operating system on first drive and bios has second (third?) hard drives on the boot list.

 

[nd4spdsho]

Thanks for the help! Maybe I was a little hazy in my original post.

I have a striped Raid set up on my Gigabyte board which has my OS on it. These other drives that I'm having trouble with have no OS on them, just data, but when I hook them up to the primary/secondary IDE ports on the board, the BIOS reads the boot sector off these storage drives.

Not sure if this changes the scenario at all

 

[wolluf]

Still the same approach - take the data drives of the list of places the bios is looking to boot from (ie, in bios settings).

 

[edfair]

I've never researched the issue, but the MBR is separate from the partition table and is only needed as the boot loader.
Suspect that you could use something like a sector editor and wipe out the MBR and the BIOS would still identify the partition table for drive assignment.
Were I trying to eliminate it, I would run a zero fill utility, then fdisk to partition. then see what happens.
Think the boot record is part of the format , which normally comes later.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[wolluf]

Ed - the partition table is part of the mbr - so if you really wipe mbr, you wipe partitions too! MBR is just start of boot process process - it has code which passes control to the partition marked as active in the partition table. That partition's boot sector then boots (or doesn't if its corrupt or not really a boot sector) its operating system. Boot sectors are created by operating systems (and usually utilities available with o/s - for example, 9x/ME sys command creates a boot sector, 2k/XP fixboot command from recovery console creates a boot sector - also needs ntldr, ntdetect.com & boot.ini to be in place).

 

[nd4spdsho]

Excuse my thick headedness...

So what you guys are saying is if I do an fdisk /mbr with data on the drive, the data will be lost. Correct, or no?

 

[edfair]

No. fdisk /mbr rewrites that portion of the first sector that contains the boot loader.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[wolluf]

If you are running windows o/s, fdisk /mbr will make NO difference (as disks will already have standard windows boot sectors). As I said earlier - make sure the non-RAID disks are not on the bootable drive list in the bios (though you should be set to boot from your RAID set up?). You basically don't want to be doing anything to the disks - the boot process is initiated from the bios & the bios settings determine what will be attempted to boot from and in which order. So that's where you should be changing settings.

(fdisk /mbr does not destroy data - nor the partition table)