MBR missing cause and solution

#1

I know of a couple of people that suffered from this problem whilst installing Windows 7 so I thought I’d shed a bit of light on the subject.

Basically the cause of this problem is to do with the boot order of your HDDs.

Not that I am 100% certain about this but it seems to be true from my findings, which ever HDD in your system has boot priority over the rest will be the one that ends up with the Master Boot Record, regardless of whether the OS is installed on it or not.

What you need to do when installing is go into the bios and make sure that your system disk is at the top of the list so it is the one that has the MBR installed on it. Understand that it does not matter which HDD you select to install W7 in the installation, the HDD that is first in the boot order will get the MBR.

This is the cause of the “MBR missing” problem that a lot of people get.

Microsoft has a solution to this problem if you did indeed have your boot priority wrong.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392

That would be the quicker way to fix it or you could always reformat, making sure that the HDD you intend to install the OS on is the one that is at the top of the boot priority list.

#2

I had an issue when I first installed W7 where one of HDD’s wouldn’t appear, I wonder if this is the same cause? Old man did something and just fixed it for me because I was horribly confused :stuck_out_tongue: thought I had lost 500gb of ISO’s and music.

#3

Haha, yeah I had that issue with one of my WD HDDs. All I needed to do, and most likely all that you had to do, was go to disk management (right click on “my computer > manage > storage > disk management”) Once you have found the HDD that is missing, you simply right click on it and assign it a drive letter. That’s all I needed to do, though it may of been a different problem for you, it is a common thing I see though.

I’ve shit myself before thinking that I had lost ~500GB worth of TV series, haha.

#4

same thing happened with my samsung hdd it wouldnt show up same fix as nips needed a drive letter,

i also shat myself didnt wanna loose my 450gb of downloads