bootrec fails to repair boot

I see MBR Error 3 when this machine boots. I ran the
offline install/repair disk but bootrec failed to fix the
problem. If I run bootrec scanos it identifies the boot
partition but when I select it (the only choice), it says
cryptically "Element not found".

/fixmbr and /fixboot also fail to repair anything, yet the
machine boots alright.

Jason wrote:
I see MBR Error 3 when this machine boots. I ran the
offline install/repair disk but bootrec failed to fix the
problem. If I run bootrec scanos it identifies the boot
partition but when I select it (the only choice), it says
cryptically "Element not found".

/fixmbr and /fixboot also fail to repair anything, yet the
machine boots alright.


Do you have a Macrium Reflect Free rescue CD handy ?

It has a boot repair menu item in the miscellaneous menu.

You should *only* have the disk drive needing repair in
the computer, while doing this. That avoids the complexity
of a whole bunch of unrelated C: partitions, all getting
thrown into your boot menu for next time. It's too hard
to sort through a menu of crap, trying to pick out the
correct ones. I remove the excess drives in my desktop,
before carrying out this procedure.

There are several boot blocks. The MBR has a small amount of
boot code. Track 0 has some boot code. (On a GPT disk, this
may be the 16MB unlabeled region, but I have no way to confirm
that.) The third possible storage location, is the PBR (a few
sectors at the beginning of C: ).

I don't know whether this "report" of yours, is coming from
the actual MBR, because the MBR has several error message
in the code block of its own. And "Error 3" is not one of them.
Thus suggests some other stage is reporting this error.
And of course, we don't want to get carried away repairing
the *wrong* thing. No point beating the **** out of
the MBR, if it's not an MBR problem.

Consequently, I like the Macrium rescue CD for this, as
it has tick boxes to repave everything. No guarantees of
course, if this is some kind of weird hardware issue.
An attempt to rewrite a section of SSD, should really use
a new block from the free pool, so the problem should not
persist if you keep hammering away at it.

Paul

In article ,
lid says...
An attempt to rewrite a section of SSD, should really use
a new block from the free pool, so the problem should not
persist if you keep hammering away at it.


That's what I thought too. Yet, lately on every boot, the
machine runs a boot-time chkdsk repair for T: The WD
SanDisk Dashboard reports all is well with the drive.
SMART agrees. I've run the Dashboard's TRIM command which
I thouht would, among other things, map out questionnable
or bad blocks, but does't seem to. The Dashboard reports
that the drive has 97% of its life ahead of it...

"Jason" wrote in message
...

In article ,
says...
An attempt to rewrite a section of SSD, should really use
a new block from the free pool, so the problem should not
persist if you keep hammering away at it.


That's what I thought too. Yet, lately on every boot, the
machine runs a boot-time chkdsk repair for T: The WD
SanDisk Dashboard reports all is well with the drive.
SMART agrees. I've run the Dashboard's TRIM command which
I thouht would, among other things, map out questionnable
or bad blocks, but does't seem to. The Dashboard reports
that the drive has 97% of its life ahead of it...


Jason,

Just a shot in the dark here. Do you have Acronis True Image installed or
any other imaging software you use to make backup images of your drives?
Acronis is famous for losing track of the boot records if you have the
Acronis Startup Recovery Manager active. If you used to see "Press F11 for
Acronis Recovery" during boot-up and only see the MBR 3 error - then you
need to go into Acronis and re-activate it.

If it truly is a corrupted MBR, are there any USB drives connected (or were
there any...) that you may have booted from like when making a Linux
bootable media?

You could also try using the freeware EasyBCD 2.3 by NeoSmart Technologies
that can repair/rebuild/edit/modify the MBR.

https://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/


--
Bob S.

In article ,
says...
Just a shot in the dark here. Do you have Acronis True Image installed or
any other imaging software you use to make backup images of your drives?
Acronis is famous for losing track of the boot records if you have the
Acronis Startup Recovery Manager active. If you used to see "Press F11 for
Acronis Recovery" during boot-up and only see the MBR 3 error - then you
need to go into Acronis and re-activate it.

If it truly is a corrupted MBR, are there any USB drives connected (or were
there any...) that you may have booted from like when making a Linux
bootable media?

You could also try using the freeware EasyBCD 2.3 by NeoSmart Technologies
that can repair/rebuild/edit/modify the MBR.

https://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

Good shot! I -do- have Acronis installed, but I've been
using it for more than 10 years without a problem. In
fact, it's saved my bacon on quite a few occasions when I
did something daring (read:stupid). I have the recovery
boot-time manager installed, too - and have not ever had
trouble because of it. But....5 days ago, I installed the
2020 version of Acronis and cannot rule out a bug here and
there. I've never seen the MBR 3 error before, and it
showed up -before- the "Press F11..." today.

Thanks for the EasyBCD tip!

At the moment, I've got everything restore and it seems to
be working properly except for the mysterious Bad Block
error I see on an SSD when performing a backup (with
Acronis). The SanDisk Dashboard doesn't complain and
reports that the drive is healthy and has 98% of its life
ahead of it. chkdsk finds the error and purports to repair
it, but it shows up again if I perform another backup. I
would think that the bad block(s) would simply have been
"spared" but that doesn't seem to be happening.

In article
I've run the Dashboard's TRIM command which
I thouht would, among other things, map out questionnable
or bad blocks, but does't seem to. The Dashboard reports
that the drive has 97% of its life ahead of it...

forgot to mention: the Dashboard report on the health of
the drive shows that NO blocks have been replaced with
spares, yet at least one is clearly bad.