Suspected Corrupted Windows 7 MBR?
- by AridDecay
So, this may not be the correct place to put up my question, but i'll give it a shot.
I'm having an issue repairing this computer. It was brought to me with the described issue of 'Not turning on'
Later, I found that it would come with the error of 'No boot sector found on internal hard drive.' I assumed it was an MBR issue due to a virus or cutting a Windows update short.
I booted into my trusty recovery enviroment and ran bootrec.exe /FIXMBR and restarted -- No luck
I started to think (After multiple attempts to get the MBR sorted out, including creating a new boot sector) that the Hard-drive was possibly starting to cave in on itself, so I booted into a linux bootable CD and went to check the SMART data. Odd, say's it's inaccessible.
That seems odd to me, considering it's a newer (two years old or so) Windows 7 computer. All new Hard-drives have SMART. So, I checked the BIOS. No mention of SMART anywhere. Greaaaat.
I decided as a last-ditch effort to switch the hard-drive type to ATA in the BIOS (God knows why, I was getting frusterated) instead of AHCI. VOILA! It actually attempts to boot, gets halfway through the little windows animation, does an incredibly (Half a second) quick BSOD, and shuts down.
Does anyone have ideas on what's going on here? I'm at my wits end.