Yes, the boot sector is nonstandard, but fixmbr should not affect the Dell diagnostic partition. It will however render the Dell quick restore unusable.
ejn63: Notice that Tomster mentioned he's got a D630. That would make it a Latitude. AFAIK, I don't think Dell included the DSR (PC-Restore) system on their business model lines.
Tomster: The MBR on a non-DSR system should be stock Microsoft. You didn't mention what symptoms lead you to believe it's a boot sector virus, but if you're correct, then by definition that's a non-standard MBR.
Better read up on boot sector viruses. Many work by moving your partition table, so if you blindly do a 'fixmbr' you'll disable the virus but you'll also lose your partition table (because it's the virus that knows where it stashed your real table).
ejn63
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June 5th, 2008 18:00
Yes, the boot sector is nonstandard, but fixmbr should not affect the Dell diagnostic partition. It will however render the Dell quick restore unusable.
Tomster2
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June 5th, 2008 19:00
This laptop has an XP Pro operating system... does that have a quick restore option? or is that a Vista thing.
I am asking as I only saw two partitions... the NTFS for C and FAT32 for the Dell Utility.
Thanks.
ejn63
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87.5K Posts
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June 5th, 2008 20:00
If it's newer than 4-5 years old it does have a quick restore.
CTRL-F11 at powerup screen to use it.
dg1261
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June 6th, 2008 07:00
ejn63: Notice that Tomster mentioned he's got a D630. That would make it a Latitude. AFAIK, I don't think Dell included the DSR (PC-Restore) system on their business model lines.
Tomster: The MBR on a non-DSR system should be stock Microsoft. You didn't mention what symptoms lead you to believe it's a boot sector virus, but if you're correct, then by definition that's a non-standard MBR.
Better read up on boot sector viruses. Many work by moving your partition table, so if you blindly do a 'fixmbr' you'll disable the virus but you'll also lose your partition table (because it's the virus that knows where it stashed your real table).