Get your system ready for a Windows 7 upgrade

Get your system ready for a Windows 7 upgrade: "Restore a hard drive's lost boot sector"

A hard drive without a boot sector means big trouble — but the situation is not necessarily fatal.

Without your hard drive's boot sector, your PC can't boot or access any software on the hard drive; but thankfully, Windows' built-in repair tools can put things right.

Singing the 'can't boot my drive' blues

Karl Barton encountered one of the worst problems that can happen to a hard drive, perhaps second in severity only to a mechanical head crash:

* "My mother's Dell Inspiron 8100 died the other day. Through the process of trying to find out what went wrong with it, we lost the boot sector of her hard drive. What can I do to recover it without losing the information on it?

"I purchased a USB-to-SATA/IDE adapter that recognizes it there, but nothing shows in Windows Explorer. I tried another drive and it shows up. Is there a safe-and-easy way to repair the boot sector without losing the information on it?"

Probably, yes. If it's an XP system, you can use the XP Recovery Console's fixMBR and fixBoot commands to rebuild the Master Boot Record (MBR) and repair the damaged Windows boot sector.

The information you'll need for XP is in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 314058, "Description of the Windows XP Recovery Console for advanced users."

Vista's version of the Recovery Console is called the Windows Recovery Environment (RE) and operates quite differently. The Bootrec.exe tool in Windows RE serves a function similar to XP's fixMBR and fixBoot commands. Bootrec.exe lets you troubleshoot and repair various boot and startup issues. (BTW: Windows 7 uses the same Windows RE as Vista.)

For more information, see MS KB article 927392, "How to use the Bootrec.exe tool in the Windows Recovery Environment to troubleshoot and repair startup issues in Windows Vista."

If Windows' own tools don't restore the drive's boot sector, commercial programs such as Active Data Recovery Software's Active@ Partition Recovery (U.S. $40) may help. Read more about the utility on the vendor's site.

If you're seriously old-school, you can manually edit the boot sector, as described in an article on the NTFS.com site. Just make sure you speak hexadecimal!

Reviving an ancient DOS app in Vista

R. Neil Capper has a mission-critical DOS program (yes, they still exist). Trouble is, it stopped working after a crash:

* "I have an old DOS medical-office program with an essential patient database that dates back to Windows 3.1 and Windows 98. I'm able to run the DOS program in Windows XP and was also able to do so in Vista, until a recent crash.

"Since the crash, any attempt to load the program in Vista fails. A popup dialog box states simply '[program].exe is not a valid Win32 application.'

"I've tried unsuccessfully to load the .exe program by left-clicking, by using the Run box, and by using the command line. Can you help?"

The sequence of events — the program worked fine, there was a crash, the program is broken — strongly suggests that the .exe file was corrupted by the crash. The simplest fix would be to reinstall a copy of the old software from the original disc or backups. (You do have backups, don't you?)

It's also possible that the program's compatibility settings got scrambled. You can make sure they're OK by running Vista's built-in Compatibility Wizard, which is specifically designed to help you run old-style programs in a carefully constrained environment within Windows. See MS KB article 555917, "How to start the Program Compatibility Wizard in Windows Vista."

Likewise, it's possible that the crash resulted in the program being erroneously flagged as being a Web download, and thus may be "blocked" by Windows' security. Right-click the program, select Properties, choose "unblock," and see if that helps.

One of these approaches — reinstalling a fresh, known-good copy of the original program and/or correcting Vista's settings for the program — should get your prehistoric app going again!