MBR failure

[valkokir]

Okay, I've built quite a few computers and never had a Master Boot Record become corrupted or whatever it did.

Just to start, I have fixed the problem but am curious as to what may have caused it. I was sort of freaking out about my system dying and I didn't feel like changing one thing at a time to hunt down the problem, just wanted it fixed.

Okay, so I installed a new wireless PCI card. booted up fine. Rebooted a few minutes later and it goes to read the boot HD. Screen says "PRESS ANY KEY TO REBOOT" that's it, every time it reboots, same thing. So I double checked all the cards. SAme thing. Removed the Wireless card. Same. I had the boot drive on a PCI IDE Controller card, figured that went bad, plugged the boot drive into the master bus on the motherboard, same thing.

Put in Windows XP Bootable Install CD. I forgot to press a key to boot from CD, and windows loads right up!!!
Turns out as long as I have the bootable cd in the drive, it loads. So that's how I figured it was the MBR that was hosed. Tried the "FIXMBR" command in Windows XP repair utility, no change. Finally ran FDISK /MBR, that seems to have fixed it. New OS install and all is well.

So here's a what I know...
-Turns out the bracket on the wireless card was off center and when the screw was tightened it would pull part of the card out of the bus. Could this have fried something or hiccupped the mbr on the drive? I've straightened the bracket and the card work just fine.
- when I ran fdisk it recognized that the MBR had errors or was non-standard
- I have not tested the PCI IDE controller to know if it is bad.
- I replaced the IDE cables to the drives and threw away the old ones.
- I now have the boot drive hooked to the motherboard.
- I was running AVG free antivirus.

i know this is a whole load of info and I'm really not looking for a solution but if someone see something I did wrong that could cause this to happen again I'd like to know.

Thanks!

[valkokir]

It's actually an Ultra66. I have had one go bad before, that's why it's the first thing I tried. I have removed the card and am just using the motherboard IDE channels now. Seems fine. I'm not planning on upgrading the system anytime soon. Even if the card did go bad, could that have corrupted the MBR? I really know nothing about what could have caused that, and completely out of the blue.

[valkokir]

Yep, it's good to go now. Thanks for the info and input!

[Chris.Day]

I didn't have much luck with my Ultra100TX2 in Windows XP. The drivers on Windows Update seriously screwed up my system, so I stuck with the ones from Promise. But even they had their issues, one of which was jerky mouse movements. At any rate, while I found the performance of the card to be good (much better than the VIA Apollo Pro 133A onboard controller), it sucked up too much PCI bandwidth as a result, making TV cards unusable.

[Torque]

Have you had that card in the computer for a while? I've seen the promise bios conflict with other bios on the motherboards (like nic, onboard raid, etc). I have two promise cards that i can't use anymore because after upgrading to new motherboards, the bios' confict with each other. On one of the machines, I could see the drives on the promise sporadically in XP, and then randomly the machine wouldn't see the drives at all. The system was so fast booting up that I wasn't seeing a glimpse of an error message about conflicting bioses. I don't recall what it said but i remember that "device" was misspelled. I found alot of other people that had the same issue with the promise cards so they had to ditch'em or disable something they weren't using on the motherboard.

[valkokir]

The card was in that machine for about a year or more. I bought that particular card in about 1999. It's got some miles on it.

I never thought about the possibility of it slowing down the whole PCI bus. I was sort of impressed with the live tv quality this last time I rebuilt the system (after this all happened) and figured I was seeing things. Maybe I am hallucinating or maybe the card was really holding things up. I don't know, either way the system keeps on truckin'. When I rebuild my Office PC it'll get a boost but until then it just keeps on going. The motherboard and 40gb system drive came in the only store-bought machine I've ever bought, and that was in about 1996 or so. It doesn't owe me a thing.

Oh yeah, and I remember getting a great deal on a 128mb stick of SDRAM (still in the machine now) from ebay for a cool $100. HAHA