Ran FIXBOOT, not computer is really broken!

[J0llyR0ger]

Greetings. Last week, an employee of mine started having problems with his Dell laptop. The computer just stopped booting. After the bios loaded and memory checks completed, the computer would freeze. It would stop right before you normally see the "Starting Windows" message with the white progress bar. His drive was FAT32 formatted, so I popped in a Win98 boot floppy and booted with it. I was able to see files on his C:\ drive so I was pretty sure it wasn't a hard drive failure. Next, it looked like it could be a bad or corrupted boot sector, so I booted into the Recovery Console with the Win2K cd and ran the FIXBOOT and FIXMBR Commands without really doing any research as to what they did. I was in a hurry and I now realize that it was stupid to do it before finding out what FIXBOOT did.

Now when I boot with the Win98 floppy, I can't see any data on the C:\ drive. I also get the "NTLDR is missing" error when I try to boot up the computer.

Can anyone tell me what exactly FIXBOOT does and if there's a way to fix the problem?

Thank You for your help,
Drew

 

[Andree]

FIXBOOT writes a new partition sector. If your drive was already fully partitioned out, you may have done the same as fdisk. Try running fixmbr and point it to your primary (old primary) partition. You can also try using Winternals or some other third party software.

You should stay away from commands you don't know in the future.