MBR resize?

Anyone know how or if it is possible to bump up the size of my MBR from 200 MB? I think it is not possible because there is a max limit on it. One of the OS's, and I can't remember which one now, shows the MBR partition in the My Computer window. There might be a program out there that will overcome this issue. Let me know what you think.

 

Are we talking about your Master Boot Record?

 

Yep, the Master Boot Record. Just want to extend another partition to it or resize it somehow. Anybody done this or know of the software to do this?

 

I searched in google but nothing good until now I will keep looking.

 

You can't. The Master Boot Record is a fixed size, something like 512 bytes (yes, bytes) on IBM PC systems if I remember correctly. One of the limitations of this fixed size is that you can only have 4 partitions on a drive - a problem that was slightly alleviated by extended partitions.

The MBR's job is to hold the primary partitions on a hard drive and provide the code to load up the bootloader. The fact that you want to extend the MBR size to 200MB leads me to believe that you don't actually mean the MBR.

 

Bingo! That's why I asked. Wikipedia has a decent little article on the MBR here that should serve as a basic intro to what the MBR is, and what it's used for.

 

Thanks guys for the info. Trying to do some working around on some issues. Got PC Linux running but it corrupted my windows file systems somehow and wants to run chkdsk everytime I boot. Oh well I'll start over.

 

Having chkdsk run every time it boots may not be related to an actual problem with the disk, but with some ancillary corruption in other files. There's some info on this computing.net thread, including some links to a Microsoft KB article and a SysInternals' discussion (the latter will probably provide the most useful info if the discussion in the thread itself doesn't help). The discussion also includes some methods that can be used to stop repetitive chkdsk-ing.

 

I had a corrupted file system in the Vista partition causing this. Hard to believe? No not Vista... I'm just gonna start over with a dual boot of XP and Windows 7. My next question is after I get this set up the way I like I want to clone or ghost this drive of both partitions in a bootable backup on another seperate hard drive. What program would be best for this? I've heard that Norton Ghost dosn't work like that very well. Let me know. Thanks again!

 

I've had file system issues in XP, too.

 

Ghost and Acronis True Image will do what you want, but not quite what you want.

Your image are far too large to be bootable. What you do is creat a bootable disk with Ghost or TI that can then access the image on the removable device and reload it.

So, Install XP, then Vista, then load Ghost or TI and create a backup image on a removable harddrive. Create a bootable recovery disk when asked by Ghost or True Image.

Now, the most important part--TEST the recovery disk.

Sometimes, Ghost and True image will have a difficult time accessing the backup image from various removable devices.

 

Yea I just started over and this time I bought Apricorn's hard drive clone kit ($40 with HDD enclosure) for a bootable backup copy and Vista Boot Pro ($10) to edit the BCDedit. Both work excellent and I would highly recommend these tools to anyone with multiple OS's.
http://www.apricorn.com/product_detail.php?id=1023&type=reg
http://www.vistabootpro.org/

 

have a look at boot-it by terabyte. you are still limited to 'seeing' 4 primary partitions at one time, but by creating copies and variations of the mbr and swapping them as you start up, you can have any number of os's. i multi-boot vista64, win 7, server2008, xp and os x with no problems.