Quote Originally Posted by Xiahou View Post

Great if that fixes it, but it'd still leave me wondering how it happened.....
I had pretty much the same problem a few weeks ago.

I was replacing some parts of my system. While I was doing this, I also removed all SATA cables from the mainboard. My boot harddisk was originally connected to the SATA port #1.

When I put things together again, I accidentally connected the harddisk to port # 3 or 4. Then I switched the PC on and faced the symptoms that Lemur described. Fortunately I found a solution for this via google. IIRC it had to do with typing "fixboot" and some other strange commands in the Windows repair console.

After this, I looked into my mainboards´ manual. It says that ports #1 and #2 should be used for boot disks and #3 and #4 for non-boot harddisks or optical drives.

That´s why I strongly believe, that the MBR was damaged because I connected the harddisk to the wrong port, at least in my case.

Maybe Lemur can comment on this.