Windows 7 forum: Windows 7: MBR error 1 on startup

After days of pulling my hair out I have finally solved the issue - but unfortunately the saga seems to have damaged/corrupted my HDD.

First of all I had a 2Tb HDD divided into 2 partitions ( 1 = C: 500Gb for the operating system and key files; 1 = D: 1500Gb for data). My plan was to have cloned the C: portion as it was only ca. 80Gb in size and so would have fitted neatly onto my new 128Gb SDD.

The error arose when I first of all tried to defrag the C: partition and then set the drive to ACHI (rather than IDE mode). This messed up the MBR. I tried resetting the BIOS SATA back to IDE, but got the error detailed in my initial post. I tried resetting the BIOS and also clearing the CMOS but still got the mbr error 1 message on boot.

So in the end, I downloaded and installed a later version of the BIOS for my motherboard (Gigabyte X50-UD3r rev2; changed from BIOS version FA to FH), and reset all of the SATA back to IDE. I then booted up with my Windows 7 installation disc in the DVD, tried to boot from DVD, and at long last it booted up from the DVD and gave me the option to repair the mbr. My PC booted up and then I was able to restart it again without having the DVD in the drive.

I then decided that rather than try and clone my C: drive onto the new SSD, that I would carry out a fresh install of Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. I disconnected all HDDS, installed the SDD, and went in to the BIOS and set the SATA regime to ACHI. I was then able to install Windows 7 successfully without having to worry about setting up TRIM or aligning the SDD (as luckily Windows 7 carried this out on installation).

After installing/updating Windows, MS Office and the other programs I use, I then tried to install the software for my HP Officejet printer (which I had previously installed without problem on this and other PC's using either the 64-bit or 32-bit copies of the software). I downloaded the latest version of the 64-bit software from HP, and started the install. It ran into a problem and didn't install properly, and then I found that I was unable to uninstall it as it was missing some files to uninstall smoothly. I tried an uninstall using Revo Uninstaller and that also failed.

So I decided to go back to square 1, and reinstall Windows from scratch (again!). I didn't erase or reformat the SDD - just deleted the MBR and main partition at the start of the Windows 7 installation. His time I installed the Officejet software immediately after I had installed/updated Windows 7 and MS Office 2010, and before I had installed any firewall (Comodo) or AV (Avast). The installation went smoothly. I then installed the rest of my software.

On a separate PC, I reformatted my HDD (the one with the C: and D: partitions) and restored a recent backup of my D: (data) drive - BTW this PC had SATA ports set to IDE. I then installed this into my main PC (the one with the SDD and SATA ports set to ACHI). Everything seemed to be OK, until the drive seemed to disappear at times when I was copying data to it, or if I was accessing Outlook 2010 (I had the .pst file on my D: drive).

As it is a WD drive, I ran the WD Lifeguard program - the quick test showed an error, but on rebooting and retesting the quick test ran OK; I'm now running an extended test - but I don't really trust this HDD anymore, so I'll probably restore my data onto a different one.

Now all I have to do is figure out if I can get my Outlook 2010 to search through my emails again - I switched off the Windows Indexing function when I reinstalled Windows as a number of other sites suggested that it was better if it was switched off when using an SDD - however it seems that this function is needed for Outlook searches; so that's another problem to solve!

So I'm really not sure at this stage if the original problem was due to wrong BIOS settings, a corrupted mbr, or a corrupted/failing HDD. All I know is that I never expected that installing a SSD would end up being such a trial!

Oh, and if you are using a Gigabyte X58a-UD3r motherboard - it is recommended that you don't use the Marvell SATA 3 ports for your SSD as these seem to give problems according to other posters (I ended up using the slower SATA 2 Intel ports).