[BigV]

While I'm waiting, I'll think out loud about problems like this. I'm not trying to patronize anyone.

The computer has a cpu, the central processing unit. The "big" chip that gets all the headlines. It's like the engine in a car. It takes a lot of parts to make a car go, but the engine is the component that gets the badge with displacement or aspiration, etc. In the computer, the cpu can only run instructions, just as the engine can only run on gas. When the computer is **first turned on**, there are no instructions. Lots of stuff has to happen first.

The first thing that happens when the power's turned on is a chip(s) in the computer that has built into it just a few instructions is activated. These instructions are the barest minimum that are needed to tell the computer where the pieces and parts are. Where to find more instructions and where to put the result of those instructions. The input and output systems of the computer. This is the BIOS, the Basic Input Output System. Every computer has something like this.

It is this bios that we were all frothing about at the start (and well into the thread). It is activated at the very *very* beginning, and it is the part where the computer gets to learn what hardware is where, like... your drive C:. What's on the C: drive? More instructions of course, not to mention your data. This is why we wanted to find out if the bios could see drive C:. Turns out you could see C:, a very good thing.

Now, once the bios has id'ed all the parts in the system (more or less), it hands control off to the next part, usually drive C:. Usually, but not always. For example, lj was able to boot (btw, boot is short for bootstrap loader. A bootstrap loader is a program on a chip/disk that starts a system from essentially nothing, just as you would levitate yourself by lifting up on your own bootstraps.) the system from the cdrom drive. The bios knew enough to boot, then hand off control to the next system. C: drive in this case was not working so the cdrom was the next choice.

At this point, we've booted the system to the point when we can use the instructions on **some** disk (hd or cdrom). Now the process repeats itself kind of, just like you'd shift gears in a car as you accelerate. This boot (not power on boot, but from a disk boot) process also has a starting point. The beginning part is called the Master Boot Record. This is a bit like the first groove on a vinyl LP (children, seek out your parents or grandparents for information on "vinyl LP"). If this groove is functioning properly, it guides the needle and tonearm to the rest of the record where the music plays, and so it works on your hd (hard drive). If this groove (boot record) has a scratch, you're kind of screwed. The needle and tonearm will not get to the music. Same is true for the hd, if the boot record is messed up, like if it is expecting to see the next instruction in location 1 but is instead directed to location 33, trouble will result. Imagine trying to listen to the record from the first groove and then jumping to groove 33. You'd miss a lot, right? So would the computer.

Fixing this in the computer is best left to a program that can detect this trouble and using the repair commands in that program. One of the previous post described this process with the fixmbr command. This seems like good advice in this case.

This is a good place to stop for now.