Have a slight problem with my harddrive, seems everytime the power is shut off to my computer the MBR gets scrambled and booting with a boot floppy does not work since it cant read the partition tables off the dirve!

Found that by using this install disc which came with my maxtor 100 gig drive has a update MBR code which fixes everything and Ill I need to do is boot with a floppy then reinstall a boot manager.

I use GRUB as a boot manager and dual .. rather quad boot between xp,2k,slack,debian... Ive reinstalled and completely done zero filled the drive several times and nothing seems to work.

Could this be related to small 100 meg /boot partitions or is it a problem with grub??

My drive layouts are usually...

Primary -15 gig win2k
Primary -15 gig winxp
Primary - 100 meg /boot -slack
Extended for the rest
7 gig / -slack
100 meg /boot - deb
5 gig / -deb
and other partitions for testing out other distro's seeking the one that fits me best.

Its not related to your boot partition. Is it just when you poweroff? If you do a warm boot does the computer sucessfully bootup again?

Make sure the motherboard's BIOS is set for auto detect for the drive. If it only happens when you poweroff the computer maybe the CMOS battery is bad.

It occasionally does it from a "warm boot" - Setting in cmos are set correctly and battery voltage (cmos) is good, onboard voltage and I checked it with multimeter.... the board itself is only bout few months old.

Ive only just lately had this problem ... and still just lately been using a seperate boot partition and GRUB... before it was just one large root and lilo.

Having a seperate /boot partition shouldn't effect the MBR.
Does it happen more with windows vs linux?
Is the boot sector virus detector enabled in the BIOS i.e if there is one? Slim chance that you could have a worm or a virus on the computer.
Check the partition table using fdisk to see if everything lines up correctly
fdisk -l /dev/hda (change hda if not correct device)

If your interested in what the MBR really is all about plus partition tables the check this out:
http://www.datarescue.com/laboratory/partition.htm

Just a while ago I shutdown my computer by accident instead of restarting it and all that was on it was a 15 gig partition for windows 2k and a 86 gig or so of just a formated fat32 partition.

Upon boot windows started normally then on the white screen with the win 2k logo and all it came to the blue screen of death saying inaccessable boot deivice. When a linux OS was on there it would boot the kernel but would not be able to mount the root partition becuase of erros such as I/O Drive read error and such...

Ive went to maxtors site and dl a program that does extensive test on the drive and all passed with flying colors.


Doing a fdisk /MBR has the same effect as booting with the install disk to setup my harddrive and updating the MBR code... with linux on there I could do this and then boot with a resuce disk and reinstall a boot manager and all would be fine till I shut it down.
If this is due to a worm or virus, how would I go about removing it from the MBR?
Ive done zero filled my drive, formated a unknown amount of times, installed and reinstalled some many times, rewritten the MBR, I guess I could just do a zero fill again then a high level format, install dos on it stead of wasting my time installing linux only to have to reinstall once I hit that power button.

Currently I have 2k on it which is unbootable and cannot reinstall unless I reformat.

Sorry, I'm puzzled and out of suggestions.

ME TOO!!!

Ive sent a email to maxtor... I'm sure they wont help hehe...

For now ill just have to use only linux as with windows I have no way to boot if the mbr gets erased (that and ive reloaded the OS so many times I could do it in my sleep).. and ill just leave the computer on...