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13936
June 14th, 2009 20:00
No boot sector on hard disk
Hi All, I have been trying to revive a used Inspiron 8200 that I bought recently. The guy I got it from told me it worked fine just needed an OS reinstalled. After ordering the dell windows XP pro reinstallation CD I tried to install the OS. At first it came up with the message that "bootmgr is missing". After reseaching this issue I decided the Hitachi 60 GB hard drive was at fault. I stuck a 100 GB seagate in and now I'm getting the message "no boot sector on hard disk no bootable devices-strike F1 to retry reboot, F2 for setup utility". I have configured my bios to recognize my cd-rom as the primary boot device and switched the bios back to hdd as the primary boot device several times, I even tried to format the new hard drive on my desktop PC using my hard drive adapter. My desktop PC will recognize the new drive but will not format it. My Inspiron 8200 bios recognizes the new hard drive too. The bios has the latest bios version 11 installed. If there is somone out there in Dell Land that can help me with this problem I would greatly appreciate it. Very Humbly yours
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ejn63
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June 14th, 2009 20:00
100G drives are very rare - is it another size? Note that the C-series (of which your 8200 is one) will not work with any drive larger than 120G.
pab49162
17 Posts
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June 14th, 2009 20:00
You might be able to solve your "bootmgr is missing" problem by rewriting the MBR (master boot record) on the 60 GB hard drive. You can do this using the fixmbr command in the XP recovery console. See http://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/fix-mbr-xp-vista/ for instructions (with pictures) on how to do this in XP as well as Vista.
Hope this helps ...
pab49162
1952bshook
4 Posts
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June 15th, 2009 08:00
Thanks for the thought ejn63, I double checked the new harddrive, it is indeed 100GB. I got it on ebay from Laptops Zone.
1952bshook
4 Posts
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June 15th, 2009 08:00
Thanks for the reply pab49162, I appreciate it. To clarify, the "bootmgr is missing" problem was connected to my old hard drive, the Hitachi 60 GB that came with the 8200 when I bought it . I was unable to install XP pro on it, so therefore I am not able to access the DOS portion of XP pro. I was hoping the previous owner somehow corrupted the integrity of the hard drive.so I hoped that replacing it with a Seagate Momentus 100GB might solve my problem. After installing my new Seagate Momentus 100GB hard drive I have not been able to load XP pro. The message after post is now "no boot sector found on hard disk" I was wondering after I posted this thread, will a Dell XP pro reinstallation disk work on a non Dell hard drive?