An MBR (Master Boot Record) is the first sector of data storage device. It is the most significant program that is used to boot the system. It does so by bootstrapping the operating system following the BIOS executing the machine code instructions. However, sometimes the MBR gets corrupt thereby hindering the boot process. It can get corrupt due to various reasons such as virus infections, file system corruption, power outages, bugs in the operating system, etc. In such situations, you should use in-place methods to repair MBR. However, if you are not able to recover the system then you should use a third-party data recovery software to recover the inaccessible data.

Consider a scenario wherein you are unable to start your Windows XP system. An error message is getting displayed, as a result, that is: Operating system not found. Missing operating system.

Then, you try to start the system from the Recovery Console. Still the system does not start and another error message is displayed, that is:

"Setup did not find any hard drives installed on your computer." Cause:

For the illustrated scenario, there could be the following causes:

The BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) is unable to detect the disk.

Sector 0 of the hard disk has an incorrect MBR.

The partition that contains the MBR is inactive.

An incompatible partition is marked as Active.

The hard disk is damaged. Resolution: To resolve this issue, you can perform the following methods: Verify the BIOS settings: You should check the BIOS settings of your system and check that it lists and recognizes the hard disk. Restart the system.

Use Recovery Console: You should use the Recovery Console to run the fixmbr command to repair the MBR of the system drive.

You would be able to resolve the problem after performing the aforementioned recover methods. However, if it is not so and you are still getting the same error, then you should use a third-party data recovery software. Such data recovery tools are read-only in nature that do not overwrite the existing storage media while scanning it.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery software is a data recovery software that recovers lost, formatted, and deleted files from FAT, NTFS recovery, or exFAT file systems. It is able to recover more than 185 different file types from various storage media such as hard drives, external hard disks, pen drives, iPods, etc. In addition, this file data recovery software recovers deleted emails from MS Outlook and Outlook Express. This RAID data recovery software is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP, and 2000.