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How the devil did I manage to screw up two Windows installations

Oldjim
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How the devil did I manage to screw up two Windows installations

Replaced graphics card - GTX 650Ti with GTX 1060 6GB

Restarted and everything worked

Windows 7 ran the new hardware update automatically and then asked for a reboot

Result no MBR - this is in the Vista 64 bit partition where the dual boot resides

Checked the hard drives using Linux boot disk and all there except not mounted

Tried Win 7 disc repair option - failed

Tried Win Vista repair option - worked in that Win Vista worked but Win 7 came up with a corrupted file

Tried Win 7 disc repair option - wrong operating system as it couldn't even see the Win 7 installation

Ran Acronis from boot disc and recovered last backup - still no success so tried recovering MBR and no success

Tried Win 7 disc repair option and it fixed the MBR

Restarted but this time after Win 7 finished installing the drivers and requested a reboot I installed the latest Nvidia drivers (I was one version back) and rebooted

Result - everything worked Grin

25 REPLIES 25
ReedRichards
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Re: How the devil did I manage to screw up two Windows installations

Nvidia installation messes with the MBR for some reason?

Your hard disk is wearing out?

Oldjim
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Re: How the devil did I manage to screw up two Windows installations

Both of them - the Vista and Win 7 partitions are on separate drives

7up
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Re: How the devil did I manage to screw up two Windows installations

Other than saving the memory of two systems running at once or needing to use specialist hardware, there really is no need for multi boot systems these days OJ. You might as well just use virtual computers instead. Have your main daily system and then create virtuals of the others you need / use regularly. That way not only can you backup the whole system(s) just by copying them but you can also move them to different physical machines.

 

I have 4 or 5 winXP VMs sat on my desktop as I type. I think I once had all of them running at once too Cheesy although I do have 16GB of ram to use..

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nanotm
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Re: How the devil did I manage to screw up two Windows installations

iirc the bootloader is on the primary drive's MBR, when you do restart updates it writes to the primary drive MBR and not to the selected os (where your using the secondary os) so it screws up both boot records because there both looking for driver files that don't exist and thus crash/

 

 

just because your paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
Oldjim
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Re: How the devil did I manage to screw up two Windows installations

assuming that you are correct - sheesh what a bloody silly system

nanotm
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Re: How the devil did I manage to screw up two Windows installations

yeah well that's one of the many things that makes running the second OS as a VM a more attractive option, that and I can just tap an icon to switch between systems as required (which is what I used to do)

just because your paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
ejs
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Re: How the devil did I manage to screw up two Windows installations

I can't really see why rebooting for updates or driver (un)installations would need to write anything to the MBR. If the operating system has things to do on a reboot, that information would be written within the filesystem containing that operating system.

nanotm
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Re: How the devil did I manage to screw up two Windows installations

when you do a restart you don't purge the ram it retains instruction sets that have operations to perform as part of the bootload sequence, i.e. overwrite MBR file list location(s), that in turn overwrites the MBR on the primary disk (not normally a problem because that's where the os is located) with a non existent location and fails to write it to the correct drive, thus both MBR's now have a file list that is wrong, neither can then call the correct files up so they both crash .....

 

its a stupid problem and its not necessarily unique to video card drivers, ive had similar problems happen when I tried ot update more than 1 programme a few years ago (both needed restart to complete) and it took me about an hour of playing about in safe mode to finally fix the problem  (but that was just one drive) doing it on a dual boot was a nightmare which was why I quit using one about 4 years ago and went to dedicated systems

just because your paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
ejs
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Re: How the devil did I manage to screw up two Windows installations

The MBR is not large enough to contain any list of files. Also, I could perfectly well choose to not reboot, switch off the computer, then switch it on again, perhaps later. The operating system will still do what it needs to do when it boots up.

7up
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Re: How the devil did I manage to screw up two Windows installations


@nanotm wrote:

yeah well that's one of the many things that makes running the second OS as a VM a more attractive option, that and I can just tap an icon to switch between systems as required (which is what I used to do)


Oi stop echoing me lol

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ReedRichards
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Re: How the devil did I manage to screw up two Windows installations


@Oldjim wrote:

Both of them ...


No, the one with the MBR - whcih I think we established was within the Vista partition.

nanotm
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Re: How the devil did I manage to screw up two Windows installations

the mbr is normally a 100mb size partition, the average data file is normaly a couple of kilobytes and will contain a string of text like say a list of files or driver locations, any name /location mismatch causes problems.

in the case of the MBR it normally contains strings of numbers that relate to specific locations on a drive address for the various bits of the operating system so the kernel can load the required bits for optimal operating parameters, in windwos it normally has an MBR on each bootable drive and the bootloader attached to the primary drive, when an (un)install happens  with a restart it doesn't trigger a bootloader it just appends the new details (locations) to the MBR of the primary drive.

@7up well you know sometimes its true that the same thing can be said by several people mostly because they have all found them to be the case ......

 

just because your paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
ReedRichards
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Re: How the devil did I manage to screw up two Windows installations

@Oldjim wrote:

@nanotm why as that means I won't have a SATA slot left

@ReedRichards disk management in Win 7 doesn't show that

2016-08-26_113103.jpg

 

This is from another thread but is/was the configuration of @Oldjim's system.  Presumably because Vista came first there is no dedicated partition for the MBR.  If I were Oldjim I would disconnect the Vista drive temporarily, boot from my Windows 7 system disc then use bootrec to create an MBR on the drive which has Windows 7 so that drive would become independently bootable.  Then you can use the BIOS to select which drive is the first-choice boot drive but you should still be able to boot the computer if something goes wrong.    

 

RobPN
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Re: How the devil did I manage to screw up two Windows installations


@nanotm wrote:

the mbr is normally a 100mb size partition, 

 

 

 


Huh? Huh Is it really ?  Roll_eyes