Dell with corrupt master boot record

[roger.f]

I have an older Dell Dimension 4550 running XP. It had a virus and several trojens. I was having some difficulty booting in safe mode. So I removed the hard drive and installed it as a secondary drive in another computer. I ran a virus scan and a scan with Malwarebytes anti-malware. I let the software remove the corrupt files and then reinstalled the hard drive in the Dell computer. Apparently one of the corrupt files was the master boot record (MBR) and now the disk will not boot. I do not have the Dell recovery disks, so I booted form a standard Microsoft XP cd and went to the recovery console. I entered the fixmbr command and got a message that the partitions were non standard. So I stopped and tried to find a solution, but found no information on Dell's partition/boot record configuration. At this point, I need to restore the mbr or get to the hidden Dell partition to restore the hard drive to factory condition.

So I learned my lesson. I should have posted first for instructions. But now how do I fix the problem?

Thanks so much for your support.

Roger

[shelf life]

hi,

Really the best place to start would be the Dell support forums. They also may have utilities to repair/replace the mbr. Fixmbr simply rewrites a new mbr using a standard format.