Need help in repairing MBR on M.2 drive

[Matt621]

Hello All,

I have an M.2 drive as my main drive.
I use external SSD drives for my backups.
I used EZGig to clone from the M.2 internal to an SSD external drive with their special cable (Apricorn)

This works great and has been for over a decade.

If I ever have an issue, all I do is plug the external drive into one of the SATA cables, change the boot order, and I boot from the external drive (which is now an internal drive) and just copy over what I need to the M.2 drive, power down, unhook the SSD drive and reboot to the M.2 drive.

However, I had a BAD SSD drive on my last backup, it did something really weird and would not finish the backup. I've had this happen before and it's always a bad SSD drive. So after waiting 4 hours (it normally only takes 1 hour to do a full backup) I rebooted the machine. When I did that I wiped out the MBR on the backup drive. Okay, no problem. I'll just go into the Drive manager and fix it. But I didn't fix it. I accidently made the messed up backup drive the active drive. I instantly realized what I did and made the old internal M.2 drive the active drive. I thought I was okay. But that did not work. When I pull all drives but the M.2 it will not boot. I think it says missing MBR or something to that effect.

So I tried to rebuilt/restore it using the original Windows installation disk. That did not work because it said I had a newer version of windows 7 than what the disk was, which I know is 100% wrong. I know for sure that's the disk I did use to originally install Windows 7 many, many, many years ago. I think the issue there is I did some sort of update (Service Pack) and that's why it no longer recognizes it. OR there is a slight complication to this. I used to use Acronis backup (which I hate) but it put some sort of boot partition on the drive. I tried deleting it and made the system unusable. I think that might be where I messed up. I think I was supposed to make that Acronis partition the active one, but I'm not sure about that. That might be what the Windows CD is seeing as the OS. I'm not sure. I've never had this issue before.

So then I put in another OLDER back drive, and it boots fine. (I have a few backups of my system).

All is good, but all the data is pretty old (this is from about a month ago)

The system now sees the M.2 as D and the backup (OLD) as Drive C and all is good.

I just need to know how to repair the MBR on the M.2 (now drive D) from the backup SSD (now Drive C)

Anyone know how to do that?


Thanks

 

[SIW2]

you havent bothered to fill in your specs.

what do you mean by "m.2 drive" is it sata or nvme ?

are you certain you are booting in bios mode using mbr partition style?

if the problem really is damaged mbr on one of the disks, it can be rewritten with bootsect.exe command line tool, or any number of 3rd party partition programs.

 

[Matt621]

you havent bothered to fill in your specs.
what do you mean by "m.2 drive" is it sata or nvme ?
are you certain you are booting in bios mode using mbr partition style?
if the problem really is damaged mbr on one of the disks, it can be rewritten with bootsect.exe command line tool, or any number of 3rd party partition programs.

Not sure what you mean by "filling in the specs."
The M.2 drive is NVME. If it was SSD I don't think I'd have the problem with the repair. (I have a recovery usb drive but w/o the NVME drivers.)
I don't know the syntax for bootsect.exe I don't want to make things worse by using a utility I don't know the syntax for.

Since bootsect is a command line command I can't just take the chance of running it w/o the parameters.

If you know how to rebuild the mbr from c: to d: using bootsect, the syntax/parameters would be great.

Thanks

 

[MisterEd]

Not sure what you mean by "filling in the specs."

The M.2 drive is NVME. If it was SSD I don't think I'd have the problem with the repair. (I have a recovery usb drive but w/o the NVME drivers.)

There are three types of SSD's in common use. They are 2.5-inch SATA, M.2 SATA, and M.2 NVMe. Here are examples of ones that I have:
Samsung 870 EVO (1TB) - 2.5-inch SATA SSD
ADATA SU800 (1TB) - M.2 SATA SSD
Samsung 980 (1TB) - M.2 NVMe SSD

Your System Specs are shown when you click on My Computers below your post. You fill in this information in your profile as shown below. There is also an option to add System Specs for a 2nd computer.

 

[Matt621]

Thank you for the help. I went thru the system specs but there really isn't anything in there that would apply to the question. It's a general Windows 7 question. How to write / repair a MBR from a known good drive to another drive. In the old days you'd just use the sys command. You write or rewrite any drive with sys x: and then the drive letter. When I go into Device Manager it's showing my backup as the primary drive (NOW) and it's showing it's a boot drive because that's my backup and I just clone my main drive to a back. But the main drive no long shows boot on it. So that is that I'm trying to fix.

Reading the net either bcdboot or bcdedit seems to be the program I need to resolve the problem but that I can find, none address how to do it on a drive other than drive 0.

Okay right after I wrote the above I found this: bcdboot c:\windows /s d:
So just so I understand correctly that will copy othe MBR from C: to D:

Right?

Here is what I have in diskpart

DISKPART> list volume


Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
Volume 0 NTFS Partition 100 MB Healthy System
Volume 1 C M.2-NVME-C NTFS Partition 931 GB Healthy Boot
Volume 2 E NTFS Partition 100 MB Healthy
Volume 3 D M.2-NVME-C NTFS Partition 931 GB Healthy
Volume 4 F RAW Partition 1843 GB Healthy
Volume 5 NTFS Partition 1170 MB Healthy Hidden
Volume 6 WINRETOOLS NTFS Partition 7736 MB Healthy Hidden
Volume 7 DELLSUPPORT NTFS Partition 10 GB Healthy Hidden
Volume 8 G GIGABYTE FAT32 Removable 28 GB Healthy


DISKPART>

Drive E and F are my 2Tb backup drive. I was trying to clone my oldest BU drive to it. And it failed. But it's still plugged in. I just need to wipe that clean.
Drive G is my recover thumb drive but w/o the NVMe drivers :-(
I have no idea what/where the Winretools partition came from.
The Dell probably came from my old, old, old laptop which is what I started with, or it come have come from one of my install disks, but I though those were MS disks not Dell. The didn't say Dell on them. But that should not matter.

​

 

[SIW2]

No. bcdboot copies the boot critical files to the system partition and creates a bcd entry.

it does not rewrite the mbr code if that is indeed your problem.

It is unusual to have an nvme disk in mbr style. We ask for your specs because they can help identifying problems in many cases.

If a query has anything to do with disks, it is also useful to post a screenshot of disk management window.,

 

[file3456]

Recovering the Windows Bootloader


M.2 is the drive connector for an NVMe drive. The drive its self is called an NVMe drive (Non Volatile Memory Express). Other connector types you may come across are U.2 and U.3.

Now you know... and knowing is half the battle...

 

[Matt621]

No. bcdboot copies the boot critical files to the system partition and creates a bcd entry.

it does not rewrite the mbr code if that is indeed your problem.

Okay that's part of my problem. I thought "boot critical files" WERE the MBR.

What is the difference here?
And do I use fixmbr? bootrec? fixboot? The more I read the more I'm confused as to what each does and when to use what..
Thank you all for the replies.