Help fixing MBR? (Thinkvantage button doesn't work)

I could use some assistance getting the Thinkvantage & F11 buttons to be reneabled again. Fn and Thinkvantage buttons work correctly when booted into Windows as does the R&R software, but will not go into the recovery partition when booting the machine.

The blue Thinkvantage button will only show a "Startup Interrupt Menu" with three options: pressing ESC to resume startup normally, F1 to enter the BIOS or F12 to load the boot menu.

I ran the MBR repair floppy (the CD ISO reported errors on download & burn with 2 different programs), but it said that the MBR might not be from Lenovo and did apparently did nothing. Should I try the replace option instead of repair? What will that do and will it affect my disk partitions?

I did repartition the C drive into multiple C, D, & E drives, but did not change or move the service partition which I can see in disk management. This was all working until I booted the machine with an old drive in the SATA ultrabay. Windows went wacko getting drive letters confused and kind of merging the boot from both drives. I got that fixed and the preboot environment is all thats left to resolve.

Thanks a lot

 

I experienced a similar problem when I was setting up my multi-boot setup. You are going to need a Vista install disk to fix this problem. Unfortunately, in their infinite wisdom Lenovo decided not to provide a Vista disk with their Thinkpads, and will charge you $50 if you want one.

If you have a friend with an actual Vista install disk (not a factory recover disk) borrow that. I ended up using some old Vista Beta disks I had lying around, otherwise I would have been screwed as well.

After you get the Vista disk you will need to boot with that. You will find an option to "repair my Windows installation". You can use that to repair your MBR and that should fix your problem.

 

Thanks. I do have a Vista install disk available to me, but I am running a Lenovo XP Pro installation. Does that matter? I was surprised the Lenovo utility repair option did not work as it has for so many. I was afraid to try the replace option since I don't know enough about MBRs to understand if it would cause other problems since I had repartitioned the C drive (but left the service partition alone).

Would an MBR from another drive with a service partition work as I do have my old smaller drive? Although I would need to find an MBR utility to backup and restore it...or I suppose if there was an MBR editor I could mimic what was on the other drive if it wasn't too confusing to do.

Any advice appreciated.

 

Well Vista uses a different boot loader than XP, but since you're using XP it's even easier.

You need fdisk to execute fdisk /mbr using a floppy disk. You don't need the CD though, check out MBRFix

The command is mbrfix /drive 0 fixmbr /yes
where 0 is your drive # (your first drive, C)

There's more details everything available with MBRFix here: http://www.sysint.no/nedlasting/mbrfix.htm

 

Did you use this CD ISO: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=2925901

 

revvo: mbrfix looks like a good utility and I'll take a look at it.

arlab: I found that in my original search and then downloaded the ISO but when I tried to burn it I got errors: ImgBurn: invalid or unsupported image file format Nero: Foreign image file, the block size does not conform to the image length, do you want to correct or ignore? Since this is messing around with the HDD structure and I have no backup of the MBR (altho MBRFIX might allow that), I didn't want to guess.

I borrowed a FDD and used the diskette file from the Lenovo link, but repair option failed (msg about it might not be a Lenovo mbr) and I wasn't sure if I should try the replace option not knowing if that could mess up the repartitioned C,D,E drives that are working.

I also found this: how does this differ from the master boot record repair option at http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-62978

Thanks all - your help is very much appreciated

EDIT Update: I took the floppy and ran it through Make Bootable CD option inside Nero on another computer. Booted CD in T61 and got same results when selecting the Repair option: INT24 Error, May not be a Lenovo MBR.