A friend has a corrupted MBR but I noticed this evening that he has a small (650 mb) partition on his hard drive that he does not want. The person that set up his machine put it there to hold files that will be written to CDR. I was wondering if deleting that partition would cause Windows XP to rewrite the Master Boot Record. Thanks

Why aren't you just using the FIXMBR command from the recovery console?

Seems a bit pointless having a partition so you can move the files you want to write to CD from one place on your disk to another. Get rid of it.

If you use windows drag and drop burning then win copies the files to your hd first, even if there allready on your hd it copies them. So it would make sence to have a separate partition for this to avoid fragmenting the other partitions everytime you burn a cd. you would want it to be closer to 1gig tho. you should keep a bit of "breathing room" for the disk.

unless your using a third party partition program. yes it'll overwrite the mbr, and you'll get "no os found" after reboot,when using fdisk or other windows or ms software. google search

Thanks for the responses. We tried the fixmbr and fixboot commands yesterday and the program indicated that they worked but apparently they didn't. We also tried to run Partition Magic but it would not run because of the corrupted boot record. He did not know that the small partition was being created for him by the installer and he has never used it. It sounds like we will just have to repartition, format, and reinstall all his software. Luckily, he has Norton Ghost and has imaged his C: drive within the last few days. He also has Partition Magic so the whole operation should not be too bad other than the time he will spend ghosting his D: drive to save his other data and programs. Thanks again for the advice