Comment by Graziano_M

4 days ago

I had a friend's dad's computer's HDD fail while I was installing Linux on it to show him it. That was terrifying. I still remember the error, and I just left with it (and Windows) unable to boot. Later my friend told me that the drive was toast.

Come to think of it, maybe it was me. I might have trashed the MBR? I remember the error, though, "Non system disk or disk error".

3 comments

Graziano_M

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toast0  4 days ago

IIRC, that error text comes from the mbr. You may have trashed the partition table?

  • Graziano_M  3 days ago

    Yeah, I think so. It's been ~25 years, and only while typing out that comment did I remember the error message and realize that's probably what I had done.

    If I recall correctly, he ended up scrapping the drive.

justinclift  3 days ago

Yeah, sounds like the drive was still physically detected but that the expected boot loader wasn't present any more.