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Questions tagged [bootsector]

The bootsector is located on bootable disks such as hard drives, CDs and floppy disks. It is loaded by the BIOS and in turn loads the operating system. It is frequently a target for viruses.

32 votes
5 answers
8k views

Is the boot sector really just the beginning of a drive?

First, I am assuming that drives and/or partitions have a linear address from start to finish. This must be the case, or else programs like dd would not be able to function as a copying mechanism. Is ...
Nacht's user avatar
  • 717
10 votes
6 answers
106k views

How to create windows 8 boot partition on drive that never had one?

So 3 months ago I built a PC, but had the opportunity to borrow an SSD from my place of employment. I originally installed windows 7 trial mode on that SSD, and then after a few weeks upgraded to ...
wizpig64's user avatar
  • 239
8 votes
5 answers
2k views

How to write a localized NTFS boot sector?

Little unknown fact: NTFS boot sectors come in different languages. They can say "BOOTMGR is missing" and "Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart", but they can also say the same thing in other languages. This ...
Massimo's user avatar
  • 2,639
6 votes
2 answers
8k views

Boot Signature - BIOS

I understand that the BIOS is in ROM, and the manufacturer "typically" designs it to point to the first sector of the "active" storage device's first sector or CHS (0,0,1)*physical and CHS (0,0,0)*...
Jordan Davis's user avatar
5 votes
3 answers
426 views

Does NTFS (or any file system) support files outside of the partition?

So on my C: drive, there was a file called BOOTSECT.BAK. Not knowing what it is, I opened it up in HxD and the first 14 bytes were B \0 O \0 O \0 T \0 M \0 G \0 R \0 corresponding to the UTF-16LE ...
Cole Tobin's user avatar
5 votes
2 answers
467 views

Is it safe to overwrite LBA 2-2047

So back when I used WUBI before settling on using a VM, GRUB was installed (but I messed it up and had to reinstall everything (luckily I backed up)). That was back when I used Vista which starts at ...
Cole Tobin's user avatar
5 votes
1 answer
20k views

Recover Lost NTFS Partition With Corrupted Boot Sector

Is there a way to recover a lost NTFS partition with a corrupted boot sector ? The backup boot sector is also corrupted. I know that the NTFS partition used to start in sector 551585791.
Elmo's user avatar
  • 14.7k
4 votes
4 answers
42k views

Restoring MBR, partition table, and boot sector of memory card without data loss ("USBC")

Abstract I have a FAT32 memory card that when inserted into a computer causes Windows to prompt to format it. The card is definitely not supposed to be blank and has a bunch of files on it. Symptoms ...
Synetech's user avatar
  • 69k
3 votes
1 answer
2k views

Why is it even possible to overwrite the boot sector

Why is it possible to overwrite the boot sector so trivially in Windows? I just had a little coding accident involving writing to a raw physical disk, and I messed up the arithmetic and ended up ...
Thomas's user avatar
  • 468
3 votes
2 answers
3k views

How do I fix a Windows XP bootloader error when BOOTCFG, FIXBOOT, and FIXMBR do nothing?

I recently replaced a faulty hard drive with two hard drives that I then raided (1) together and installed Windows XP on about a week ago. Since then, I have always received this error: Windows could ...
NobleUplift's user avatar
  • 1,615
2 votes
3 answers
8k views

How can I zero out the boot code of a MBR?

I have two drives in my Windows system: Drive 1, System and Boot. Drive 2, data storage. Some time previously, I had Windows installed on the second drive. Now that I have the current setup, I would ...
K.A.Monica's user avatar
  • 6,553
2 votes
2 answers
19k views

Cannot access disk, partition table broken

I was so dumb, to turn of the power on my Readynas Ultra 4 when it was installing the disk (3TB WD Green), I had no time to wait for it as I was going to return it (It was to damn noisy) The disk ...
user1217169's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
4k views

How can I recover a lost MBR/boot sector?

I had a VDI (VirtualBox Virtual Disk Image) with Ubuntu 11.10 (64bit, I think) installed on it. Earlier, while running a GParted live CD on my Virtual Machine to erase the partition table of another ...
kettlepot's user avatar
  • 1,005
2 votes
2 answers
2k views

How do I copy the boot sector from one computer to another?

I have a pair of identical computers. One of them stopped booting the other day (it gets past the BIOS screen then goes black). Booting from a USB recovery stick I've verified that the partition is ...
Jon Cage's user avatar
  • 2,607
2 votes
0 answers
1k views

Ubuntu Error: failure reading sector 0x100800 from 'hd0'

My laptop freezed, so I restarted my system manually, and ended with the Grub terminal. I tried running the ls command in Grub terminal and got the result as grub> ls (hd0) (hd0, gpt2) (hd0,gpt) ...
Barath adhithya's user avatar

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