blinking cursor after POST. bad MBR?

[paranoid]

Hey Hey,
Had this one a few times. Computer with NT4 WS installed, speced as follows,
Intel P3/733
Intel D815eea mainboard.
256mb RAM
Intel 100+Nic
20gb HDD, LS-120, 50x CDrom.
Directly after the POST, all that apears is the blinking cursor in the top, left screen. I fix it with a re-install. If it were DOS, I'd use 'fdisk /mbr'. Does anyone know how to replace or repair a NT MBR without dumping the whole HDD? And I don't mean backing up, reinstalling and restoring backup. I've also tryed BOOTPART 2.2 for this, but it says I must unlock the drive. I do this and still get a big fat halt due to direct disk access. anyone?

[condor]

you can use fdisk /mbr in WinNT 4.


are you sure your partition is active ?

boot order in BIOS.

I have 2000 Intel 815 eea boards at work (similar specs to yours) no problem at all.

Make Sure HDD is set to Master - not Cable Select..

[supatech]

Make sure you create a recovery disk and you can do a repair with it without reinstalling

[paranoid]

All of the above is cool, but I was not aware that fdisk could be used in this fashion with NT4. Thanks, I'll give it a try next time. IO've got heaps of these machines in the field too, but mine are at a university. you know how it goes. student bored, student break stuff, student laugh, tech crys....

[iamtheman]

Ok first of all is C: FAT or NTFS??

Here's your main problem either the boot.ini, NTLDR, or NTDETECT.com is corrupt. When this happens rather that reinstalling go to another NT workstation format a disk and copy those files onto it, making sure to adjust the boot.ini so that it reflects your disk setup. Then boot off of this disk. This will get you back into your system.