I have what I think is an MBR problem on a boot device. I get a Boot Device not available when I try to boot. However if I attach another drive that is a mirror of the affected drive, that drive loads its MBR, and its Windows XP boot.ini then points back to the original boot device which is able to boot.
I ran aswMBR, and interestingly this gives a hint of a problem when the Scan tells me that the Disk 0 MBR hidden. It should not be hidden should it?
I run FixMBR inside aswMBR, which finishes, and then I run Scan again. Now it does not report the MBR as hidden.
I try to reboot and I still get the Boot Device Not Available. I turn on the drive with the mirror of the affected device. Again the MBR loads from that mirror device and points back to the affected drive. Windows loads from the affected device. I re-run aswMBR, and again my MBR reports as Hidden.
Does anyone have any insight into what might be happening here?
Background facts:
- Dell Precision 380 running as the boot device two identical Western Digital Raptor 10K drives, configured as RAID 1 using the Intel built in RAID in the Dell system.
- Dell BIOS is configured to make the RAID 1 volume bootable and all other hard drive boot devices are disabled. It is interesting because the device with the mirror of the RAID 1 volume is NOT marked as bootable, and yet the system is able to boot it and use its MBR to load and use its boot.ini to point back to the original device that does not boot.
- The boot device with RAID 1 IS marked Active.
- I run the Avast Quickscan from aswMBR with the latest download and it does not find anything.