Repair MBR?

I've been trying to sort out my CPU overclock lately and as Windows crashed and restarted due to an unstable overclock I neglected to to run the file scan that was presented on the next boot. It now appears my MBR may be damaged. It doesn't appear catastrophic but boot up is slower with the addition of the blue Windows logo and lot's of screen flickering. Also lockscreen features aren't working.

I tried all available bootrec commands today in Windows recovery console but none were able to repair the MBR. Do I have any other options or does it look like a reinstall?

First of all do you actually have a MBR most modern systems use ufei and got disk? The MBR is the bit that contains the boot code so if your booting it's working. What error do you get and can you post a screenshot from disk Management showing details of the drive

Ah yes sorry, must be GPT. Someone else I spoke to said your MBR must be damaged. I overlooked that GPT was newer.

There's not really an error, just that boot up is bit slower with the addition of the blue Windows logo and screen flickering during boot.

I seem to think this coincided with cancelling a file check after an overclock related system crash but now I'm not sure and it may have been like this longer than I think. Lockscreen features seem to affected as the Windows spotlight isn't working.

Affected drive of course is C:, OS SSD.

chkdsk C: /f

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Kol12 said:

I tried all available bootrec commands today in Windows recovery console but none were able to repair the MBR. Do I have any other options or does it look like a reinstall?

In addition to the above there are a few other options.

You can use macruim to repair the mbr or you can copy one from somewhere you trust.

I enclose 2 here - one for use with AHCI (patched.bin) and one for use without (backup.bin). Boot from Linux and copy like this..

Code:

sudo dd if=patchedcode.bin of=/dev/disk0 bs=440 count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
440 bytes transferred in 0.002796 secs (157371 bytes/sec)

backup.bin is Windows standard, patchedcode.bin adds AHCI. At your own risk but backup.bin is what Windows installs.

This is default: backup.zip

This patchedcode.zip changes IDE to AHCI as described here

In either case it is only 440 bytes you copy. Perhaps there is more to it but it is beyond my knowledge.

AddRAM said:

The logo, the spinning circle of dots, and the quick flicker (black screen for a nano second) are normal, what is your boot time ?

If you reset the Bios to defaults or it did it on its own (which usually happens after a failed OC) then your Bios boot time will be slower (as per the timeout setting) but not windows boot time. Not sure why the logo didn`t always show up.

Having all those drives and what not slows down boot time too.

Are you sure the logo and the spinning circle of dots etc is normal? In the past I recall going from the BIOS post straight to the lockscreen.

Cold boot today with all of those drives still plugged in was 47 sec

Restart with the two thumb drives disconnected was 27.7 sec

In the past I've had boots as fast as 9.5 sec

dalchina said:

Also note F: is RAW - possibly a symptom of an unreadable disk after upgrading to Win 10?

The F: is an SD card inside a usb card reader...

If you have all those drive connected and set to auto in the bios it will have to goto each drive and request its info during boot which can take time if there is an option in the bios to set the drives to actual parameters it will be faster