a while ago i had a powercut that killed my slave drive. I have posed about this, and am still trying the advice ty lol. Now my primary drive is telling me the master boot record is corrupt, but windows is loading fine, apart from frequent crashes. I have narrowed these down to irq's. Basically, when I ring micro$oft, to reactivate after another format, I have some queries.... I am assuming that the MBR is the "map" to everything on hard drives, and stored on its associated drive. Can this Mbr be backed up every hour, just in case a power cut messes the MBR? Hopefully it could be backed up to floppy. Does de-fragging assist a recovery program with problems like mine? Is there something i could buy that would keep my power going in a power cut, to give me 5 minutes to shut down? thanks for any help :o) Yoda

Fixboot and FixMBR can easily be used to repair your boot record, you can go through the DiskProbe rigmarole or get a third party software to backup the MBR. The MBR resides only on the active drive (drive C:) regardless of how many drives you've got. "I have narrowed these down to irq's"...I can see the power flunctuation corrupting your MBR than irq's. I'd rather you periodically make images of your drive and reimage the drive if things were to go wrong at some point. Leadtek sucks BIG TIME

"I am assuming that the MBR is the "map" to everything on the hard drive" bad assumption. mbr stands for master boot record. What maps the drive like to describe is the FAT [file allocation table]or MFT [master file table] "Is there something i could buy that would keep my power going in a power cut, to give me 5 minutes to shut down?" YES and its called a UPS [uninterruptable power supply] A smart ups will shut your system down gracefully if you are not there. Golly gee wilerkers everyone. Learn to Internet Search