Hi there, [snip]
If you really want to clear a hard drive entirely (which is what the article seems to be talking about), try using the floppy-based disk utilities you can download from maxtor.com.
I don't think that Martin wants to reformat his entire drive.
Jerry, you are right. I just want to recover/reinstall a working boot-manager. When I came home yesterday and read the article http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue63/okopnik.html I was scared by the last comments "...Your HD is now in a virgin state, and ready for partitioning and installation... "... so I dropped the idea quickly.
Since I do regular Linux installfests, I generally carry a standalone DOS diskette and Partition Magic. I would suggest that Martin also take a look at the anti-virus or firewall software that might be running on XP. That could very well be the culprit.
When all my boot-manager problems began I first did a 'fdisk /mbr' from a M$-DOS boot diskette; later I booted SuSE 9.0 from CDROM and reinstalled LILO, as pointed out by Marek Chlopek on his email (my previous thread: GRUB/LILO boot problems on SuSE 9.0). As I said, everything works fine, even when rebooting the system several times in a row, until I power off the box...
I've used fdisk /mbr many times. I have found that sometimes you need to run it multple times.
hmmm... odd, as all M$ apps... :P
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 can be run from the SuSE rescue system.
Will this __safely__ correct/delete the MBR so I can reinstall it using the boot CDROM? Please, keep in mind that the hard disks contain much information and I cannot afford myself it to be lost somehow...