Moving MBR from one drive to another.

[mirhagk]

So here's the situation, my current set up is like this:

Disc 0: MBR Partition, then unpartitioned space
Disc 1: C:\ drive OS

Both are dynamic discs (from an earlier attempt at RAID'ing). I would like to install windows server 2008 on disc 0 (for work) but it doesn't like the dynamic diskc. And I can't convert it to a dynamic disc since the MBR is on it. And I can't use the trick of removing disc 0 and getting windows recovery disc to fix it, the recovery disc just fails.

Is there any way to move it so that the OS and the MBR are on the same disc (don't care which one moves, just that they both end up together) so I can convert one of them back to non-dynamic disc, and install windows server 2008 on it?

[md]

1) Back up your data somewhere else (not onto a dynamic disk).
2) Zero out both drives using a live CD. You especially want to zero out the first and last megabytes of the disks.
3) Install whatever OS you want using normal partitions. Don't use windows to manage a RAID, don't use dynamic disks.

As for moving a MBR from one drive to another, I would suggest you read more about master boot records.

[mirhagk]

So it will require reinstalling my OS (yet again lol)?

EDIT: And is there no way to move my OS over by a certain amount, and then move the MBR from the first disc to the second?

What if I use a liveCD to complete delete and reformat the first drive, turning it into a simple disc, and then use my windows 7 recovery disc to replace the boot sector on the first drive, but just not as a dynamic disc. (the windows 7 recovery disc was able to repair the boot sector after I reformatted it, but I haven't tried zeroing it.

[md]

mirhagk @ 2012-02-01, 12:05 pm wrote:

So it will require reinstalling my OS (yet again lol)?

EDIT: And is there no way to move my OS over by a certain amount, and then move the MBR from the first disc to the second?

What if I use a liveCD to complete delete and reformat the first drive, turning it into a simple disc, and then use my windows 7 recovery disc to replace the boot sector on the first drive, but just not as a dynamic disc. (the windows 7 recovery disc was able to repair the boot sector after I reformatted it, but I haven't tried zeroing it.

Every disk has a MBR (or GPT, which is similar but newer and generally better). The MBR describes the partitions on the disk and is therefore tied to that specific disk. You can easily copy one from one disk to another, but that does't mean it'll work or even make sense. What you have is two disks, each with a MBR (which is mostly ignored by Windows). What you appear to be describing is not a problem with the MBR, but with the windows boot loader and it's interactions with dynamic disks. Or, it might be a different issue - you haven't given a very good description of either your setup, the issue, any error messages, or what you've tried to fix the issue.

The short answer though is yes. You need to reinstall everything, only this time without doing stupid things like using dynamic disks or installing your OS in a non-standard way.

[mirhagk]

The space just says system reserved, is about 350mb, and has 8mb used. When I reformatted the partition the computer did a POST then said "BOOTMGR not found". I guess that's not that MBR, but rather the windows boot loader. That is what I'd like to move if possible, so that my system can boot with just one disc, and load into windows 7.