Message - Unable to load operating system from start drive

Last Updated: 7th January, 1995

Symptoms

During the boot procedure, the Boot Manager menu does not load. Instead the following message (or one very similar) is displayed:

   Unable to load operating system from start drive

Even after using FDISK to remove Boot Manager and vary the startable partition, it is still impossible to boot any operating system from the drive.

Hardware

AMI BIOS
540MB IDE HDD
OS/2 Boot Manager in the first 1MB

Problem

The Master Boot Record is corrupted, possibly because an old version of OS/2 FDISK has been used to manipulate the partition map or because of bad disk geometry.

Procedure

Only use this procedure as a last resort and at your own risk. I can't guarantee that this procedure is completely safe. It appears to have worked for me, but I don't know if there are situations in which it may result in loss of data.

Boot OS/2 from a floppy then type FDISK /NEWMBR at an OS/2 command prompt.
Reboot

Notes

This situation occured because I was trying to delete some old Linux data and swap partitions in order to reclaim the space for a 115MB HPFS partition at the end of my 540MB IDE hard drive. For some reason Warp's FDISK wouldn't let me do this (APAR PJ15972) - it complained about a corrupted partition table. The Warp Beta's FDISK did allow me to delete the partitions, but when I next rebooted, the symptoms above were observed (see also: APAR PJ15988).