Hello all,

I had a bad hard drive crash about a year ago. I remapped the drive to ignore bad sectors, restored the OS from the HP recovery partition, and went about my way. I backed up most of my data, but did not investigate further. My first of several mistakes.

Last week I realized just how much of my drive had been declared "bad sectors"--68GB out of 250GB! I have attempted (with no luck) to UN-declare these bad sectors so that they can be tested again. I have not been able to find a program that can do this. However, I ran HDDGURU on my Samsung 250GB drive, and the results showed no green, brown, or red blocks out of what I believe to be all 250GB worth of sectors. So I was encouraged. I tried a few things, including I'm afraid CLRMBR (with backup). Now I am unable to boot to WinXP because the MBR has been cleared.

I wasn't originally concerned with using CLRMBR because I thought it would be easy to restore my backed up copy of MBR. However, this has not proven to be the case. I cannot find any documentation about reloading a previously saved MBR. Even worse, I do not have a WinXP CD for repair. I am one of the stupid people that bought an HP that only provides a recovery partition on the D: partition of the same drive. The DVDs you can make from this want to install a recovery partition on my C: drive and do a full repair. This is unacceptable as I will lose data.

All I want to do right now is re-load my backed up MBR that was created by CLRMBR, then I will attempt to backup any new items since my last HD backup. I know that the old MBR resides on LBA 1, but SWITCHMBR does not give me access to that. Could someone please assist me with proper commands to re-load my old MBR?

Thank you,

Chuck