Faulty MBR, bad luck or sign of dying drive?

My trusty old B130 laptop would not boot from the hard drive. I could view
the drive partitions and contents after booting to an Acronis rescue disc. I
then booted to the Windows XP install disk and ran FIXMBR from the recovery
console. Now it boots from the hard drive and everything seems ok. I wonder
if this was just bad luck or if it's a sign of an aging drive that's about
to give me more trouble. I do regular backups to an external drive and new
drives are cheap enough these days, so I'm not terribly worried. Just
curious.

In article <QC%5p.6060$>,
"Martin Walker" <> wrote:

> My trusty old B130 laptop would not boot from the hard drive. I could view
> the drive partitions and contents after booting to an Acronis rescue disc. I
> then booted to the Windows XP install disk and ran FIXMBR from the recovery
> console. Now it boots from the hard drive and everything seems ok. I wonder
> if this was just bad luck or if it's a sign of an aging drive that's about
> to give me more trouble. I do regular backups to an external drive and new
> drives are cheap enough these days, so I'm not terribly worried. Just
> curious.

try running a repair from Windows.
How to run Chkdsk from My Computer or from Windows Explorer
1. Double-click My Computer, and then right-click the hard disk that
you want to check.
2. Click Properties, and then click Tools.
3. Under Error-checking, click Check Now. A dialog box that shows the
Check disk options is displayed,
4. Use one of the following procedures:
- To run Chkdsk in read-only mode, click Start.
- To repair errors without scanning the volume for bad sectors,
select the Automatically fix file system errors check box, and then
click Start.
- To repair errors, locate bad sectors, and recover readable
information, select the Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors
check box, and then click Start.
5. Note If one or more of the files on the hard disk are open, you
will receive the following message: The disk check could not be
performed because the disk check utility needs exclusive access to some
Windows files on the disk. These files can be accessed by restarting
Windows. Do you want to schedule the disk check to occur the next time
you restart the computer?
Click Yes to schedule the disk check, and then restart your computer to
start the disk check.

"Martin Walker" <> wrote in message
news:QC%5p.6060$...
> My trusty old B130 laptop would not boot from the hard drive. I could view
> the drive partitions and contents after booting to an Acronis rescue disc.
> I then booted to the Windows XP install disk and ran FIXMBR from the
> recovery console. Now it boots from the hard drive and everything seems
> ok. I wonder if this was just bad luck or if it's a sign of an aging drive
> that's about to give me more trouble. I do regular backups to an external
> drive and new drives are cheap enough these days, so I'm not terribly
> worried. Just curious.

Go to the disk manufacturer's website and download their test utility.
It will probably be a CD image.
Burn the CD and boot with it.
The full test may take hours but not as long as having to recover if it
fails completely.
If it tells you the drive is failing, replace it.

Eric

Ok, thanks for the advice. WD's Data Lifeguard diagnostics, Dell
diagnostics, and checkdisk all found no problem. Looks like I'll just carry
on and backup regularly.