What causes a mbr to be fixed?

[Deleted member 30]

I have just spent 2 hours trying to repair my PC. I tried rolling it back and also tried to repair from disk. None of which was of use. The PC would just hang at the start up screen. It's odd as there has been no hardware changes and the PC was fine yesterday.

In the end I had to do a repair by the command prompt using the /fixmrb and /fixboot commands before it would load into the OS.

Am I right in think that my hard drive is on the way out, and should I think about replacing it?

 

[Gordy]

Have you tried switching it off ......and then on again?

 

[Deleted member 30]

Have you tried switching it off ......and then on again?

Not since I got it working again. I am moving stuff of importance off of my hard drive and on to a backup drive as a precaution.

 

[Gordy]

Not a fan of The IT Crowd then? Hope you get it sorted anyway mate.

 

[Nick_S]

Master boot records can become corrupt for many reasons. I wouldn't necessarily say your HDD is on it's way out, but I'd be taking regular backups just in case.

 

[Deleted member 30]

Master boot records can become corrupt for many reasons. I wouldn't necessarily say your HDD is on it's way out, but I'd be taking regular backups just in case.

Yes that is a wise move. My external is full now so will get another one, any recommendations Nick? I also have an internal backup drive which is full and a partition section on the main drive which again is full. My thinking is to backup the partition next and buy a bigger main hard drive so it's on standby as I can't afford to be offline with this PC.

 

[Chris]

Run chkdsk and see what it says, if you have bad sectors it's time to look at a new drive.

 

[Nick_S]

Yes that is a wise move. My external is full now so will get another one, any recommendations Nick? I also have an internal backup drive which is full and a partition section on the main drive which again is full. My thinking is to backup the partition next and buy a bigger main hard drive so it's on standby as I can't afford to be offline with this PC.

I've never been let down by Western Digital or Seagate

 

[Deleted member 30]

I've never been let down by Western Digital or Seagate

Main drive WD and the internal back up Seagate, I have both camps covered. Thanks Nick. I will look for another external with both companies to see what the options are.

 

[Acer89]

Run chkdsk if it doesnt run run in the cmd prompt mode
Seriously, the only HDD I'd trust is the Western Digital Black . Its a bit more expensive but its a workhorse and will last years! Forget the greens.. they run on low power and lack the umph needed to power a good drive.
Cheapest is from Amazon
Alternately, think about ssd drive Samsung are currently the best. Again from Amazon
Be sure to defrag your old drive before transferring your files to your new drive. A heavily fragmented drive will often fail during cloning or migration.

 

[Deleted member 30]

Run chkdsk if it doesnt run run in the cmd prompt mode
Seriously, the only HDD I'd trust is the Western Digital Black . Its a bit more expensive but its a workhorse and will last years! Forget the greens.. they run on low power and lack the umph needed to power a good drive.
Cheapest is from Amazon
Alternately, think about ssd drive Samsung are currently the best. Again from Amazon
Be sure to defrag your old drive before transferring your files to your new drive. A heavily fragmented drive will often fail during cloning or migration.

I see a lot of Samsung drives are built by Seagate.

Will pop down to Novatech in the morning to grab a Samsung M3 External 1TB 2.5" HDD USB 3.0 this will let me free up some of the space.

I will also order WD Black 2TB 64MB Cache Hard Disk Drive SATA to swap out one of my back up internal drives as I have noticed one of them is not showing up in Explorer so maybe dead??

Will defrag while I sleep tonight and start work in the morning on getting this PC cleaned up a bit.

Thanks for all the advice.

 

[Acer89]

I see a lot of Samsung drives are built by Seagate.

Will pop down to Novatech in the morning to grab a Samsung M3 External 1TB 2.5" HDD USB 3.0 this will let me free up some of the space.

I will also order WD Black 2TB 64MB Cache Hard Disk Drive SATA to swap out one of my back up internal drives as I have noticed one of them is not showing up in Explorer so maybe dead??

Will defrag while I sleep tonight and start work in the morning on getting this PC cleaned up a bit.

Thanks for all the advice.

Checkout the range of solid state drives from Amazon. The price of SSD's is falling fast.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-in...F8&qid=1469139777&sr=1-3&keywords=samsung+ssd

 

[Acer89]

I see a lot of Samsung drives are built by Seagate.

Will pop down to Novatech in the morning to grab a Samsung M3 External 1TB 2.5" HDD USB 3.0 this will let me free up some of the space.

I will also order WD Black 2TB 64MB Cache Hard Disk Drive SATA to swap out one of my back up internal drives as I have noticed one of them is not showing up in Explorer so maybe dead??

Will defrag while I sleep tonight and start work in the morning on getting this PC cleaned up a bit.

Thanks for all the advice.

The WD Black 2TB 64MB is an excellent choice of HDD

 

[PLANofMAN]

When a hard drive is on the way out, you can usually tell by transferring large batches of files. If it freezes after 2 to 5 gigs of transfer, the HDD is worn out, or at least the motor that spins it up to speed is.

 

[Deleted member 30]

A quick update. I went with the Samsung M3 External 1TB 2.5" HDD USB 3.0

Really impressed with this little 2.5 inch drive, powered via USB and transfer speeds really quick. I managed to back up all of my C: drive and partition. So am now covered should the worse happen.

@PLANofMAN I never noticed when transferring files, so maybe I still have a bit of use left in this drive after all.

Thanks for the advice above.