Mbr woes

mattyfez · Monday at 11:38

I've been pratting about with Linux but I think I've somehow lunched the mbr on my windows drive..

I can see the drive from windows USB instalation media /cmd but I can't seem todo anything with it.

It shows in bios but not on the boot order section.

Any ideas or do I just have to reinstall Windows?

I've disconnected all drives apart from the windows drive to keep things simple

brendy · Monday at 11:42

Did you try setting your partition as active?

Armageus · Monday at 11:42

If it's genuinely still an MBR format drive than you need the BIOS to be set to CSM rather than UEFI to boot.

Diskpart "list disk" will show whether it is GPT format or not

And if it is then you should convert it to GPT with the following commands:

mbr2gpt /validate /allowFullOS - this checks the process
mbr2gpt /convert /allowFullOS - this actually converts it

then set the BIOS back to UEFI boot

mattyfez · Monday at 11:55

Armageus said:
If it's genuinely still an MBR format drive than you need the BIOS to be set to CSM rather than UEFI to boot.

Diskpart "list disk" will show whether it is GPT format or not

And if it is then you should convert it to GPT with the following commands:

mbr2gpt /validate /allowFullOS - this checks the process
mbr2gpt /convert /allowFullOS - this actually converts it

then set the BIOS back to UEFI boot

I think it's already uefi... There's a star under GPT?

Disk 1 Is My USB windows installer

mattyfez · Monday at 12:03

brendy said:
Did you try setting your partition as active?

Thanks but no Bueno.. it says disk is not a fixed MBR disk

nlel1975 · Monday at 12:03

To be honest I wouldn’t prat about with Linux as a booting operating system. It’s fine to run in a VM, I’m a newbie and it’s easy enough to find the terminal commands you need to install things.

One of the most important is to install VM tools to allow you to set resolution properly, I use VMware for virtualization.

Armageus · Monday at 12:06

yep it's UEFI.

In which case rather than fixmbr you need to rebuild the BCD with bcdboot.

mattyfez · Monday at 16:00

got fed up in the end and just did a fresh install. its only browser bookmarks and a few steam games that needed to be added back - steam is pretty cool in that you can install games from other PCs on the network - super install speed!

Thanks for the help though.

mattyfez · Monday at 16:02

nlel1975 said:
To be honest I wouldn’t prat about with Linux as a booting operating system. It’s fine to run in a VM, I’m a newbie and it’s easy enough to find the terminal commands you need to install things.

One of the most important is to install VM tools to allow you to set resolution properly, I use VMware for virtualization.

I want linux installed properly as I'm moving over from windows - I'll still maintain a windows instalation for the time being but it'll just be basically sand boxed and just fired up for the odd thing I cant do on linux.