upgrading to bigger HD: 2nd ntfs boot sector unwriteable"

[lhughes]

Some time ago I moved my XP system from a 16G Maxtor HD to a 40G Western Digital. I copied the entire drive using Western Digital's "Lifeguard" boot floppy. The new system seems to work fine, but if I schedule and run chkdsk on the new drive, I get the error (after the three phases of chkdsk run properly):

"The second ntfs boot sector is unwriteable"


Now I've hunted around on the web a bit, and determined that Windows writes a second NTFS boot sector in the middle of the disk in case of emergencies, so presumably I've lost that in the HD-copying process. The only recommendation I've seen is to backup the drive and start over. (I don't really want to do that since I've spent some time on the new drive now)

Is there any way to get the 2nd boot sector back without reformatting the drive?

Was there a way I could have copied the drive without running into this problem?

How bad would it be to just live with this the way it is? (ie what sort of emergency would the 2nd sector protect me from?)


thank you,

-Laurence

Is there a way

[s7p9a2m4]

I've never heard of a boot sector in the middle of a disk or partition.
If everything is working fine I would ignore the message. Or you can do a clean install making sure to delete all partitions and go from there.
As far as repairing boot or rewriting the boot sector, it is easily done with a couple of commands. Here is some reading for you.
http://www.google.com/search?q=repair%20mbr
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html

[lhughes]

Hi s7p9a2m4 - Thanks for your quick reply!

Just for clarity, here's where I got the info about the "backup copy of the NTFS boot sector":

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...kmsgs/2413.asp

also found this in a usenet post:

"NTFS writes a second copy of its boot sector to use
if it cannot read the first one during boot."

thanks again, -L

[s7p9a2m4]

You learn something every day. Thanks for the link.