Troubleshoot when turning on Windows 10: repair the MBR

Of course, it is not necessary to point out that the computer suddenly does not start up, for whatever reason, this translates into a serious problem. That is why in these same lines we are going to focus on one of the most common causes in this regard. Specifically, we refer to the one that we cannot access the PC’s operating system due to a failure in the MBR or Master Boot Record. In order to better understand what we are talking about, let’s actually see what this element is that we mention here.

What is the MBR or Master Boot Record

The first thing we must take into consideration at this point is that the Main Boot Record is also known as the Master Boot Record or MBR. Thus, this is the first sector of the storage unit that serves as the boot of the operating system itself. Say that this sector is sometimes used to bootstrap the operating system, while other times it is used to store a partition table.

Likewise, this MBR is also useful when identifying a HDD individual, although on some PCs this is not used. Keep in mind that in these times, hard drives tend to have a certain number of independent partitions. Here we can find several 3 primaries and some other extended ones. Of course, only one of these has the partition in charge of starting all the operating system in the disk, in theory, the sector zero of the same.

Therefore, as you can easily imagine, if this zero sector has some kind of problem, for whatever reason, the PC will not be able to boot normally. That’s where our problems with the MBR or Master Boot Record begin. But with everything and with it, below we are going to give you a hand to solve it. With this, what we really try is that everything returns to normal on our PC.

Fix Windows boot failure due to MBR

So, after what we have told you, we are going to see what to do if we find a problem with the PC MBR which is preventing the start of this. First of all say that if we see that the computer does not start, it is easy to panic. But it is not necessary to take drastic measures, since if the problem is related to this Master Boot Record, we will probably be able to fix it. As we told you, this The MBR contains the information about the disk partitions and how the computer you must load the operating system.

It is also interesting to know that the MBR is becoming somewhat outdated and is gradually being replaced by GPT or Partition Table GUID. However, many computers continue to use the MBR for compatibility reasons. But let’s see how to fix the aforementioned MBR failure to get back to working with the PC normally.

Open Windows RE to fix the bug with the MBR

Of course, once we get down to work to solve the bug we are telling you about, the first thing we realize is that we don’t have access to Windows. Therefore, since we cannot start Windows to access the command prompt window, we will take another route. For this we can use Windows RE, that is, the recovery interface of the operating system itself. Thus, to access this that we are commenting on, the first thing to do will be to press the F5, F8 or Del key repeatedly as soon as you turn on the PC. This will lead us to a window different from the usual one, where we have the possibility to click on the Repair team button.

From there, in the next window that appears in screen, we have to opt for the Troubleshoot option to access the Windows recovery interface. Thus, we are going to find several options for all this. One of them, which is precisely the one that interests us in this case, is the so-called Command Prompt.

As you can imagine, at that moment a CMD window or command prompt. In it we will have to execute some commands to repair the MBR that we have talked about. Say that here, as we are going to show you several commands, we can try to restart after each one and try to start normally.

Commands to fix Windows Master Boot Record

As we told you, there are several orders that we can use in this regard to solve the problem with MBR. The first of them is the following:

bootrec /fixmbr

Once this is completed, we will see a message on the screen that indicates it. As we told you before, now we can try to start Windows as usual. But if this command does not solve the problem, we can try the following to delete the existing MBR and create a new one:

bootrec /fixboot

Also, assuming none of this seems to work after trying start the equipmentLet’s try this one to repair the boot configuration data:

bootrec /rebuildbcd

In the event that we have installed several operating systems on the computer, execute this command to force Windows to check them all again:

bootrec /scanos

These are the commands that we can use in order to repair the Windows Master Boot Record, which should solve the problems with said MBR. Finally, we will tell you that this type of failure in particular, in many cases is usually derived from certain corrupted files. But as we have seen, the solutions For all this we can carry them out in a few seconds and without the need for advanced knowledge.