It’s also a good idea to have a secondary backup that lives offsite, such as an online backup service like Backblaze, Carbon, or CrashPlan. That means keeping a local daily backup on an external hard drive or using a third-party program for daily backups. The most important thing you can do to protect against MBR erasure and most other catastrophic PC malfunctions: Back up your personal files. Then click Next > System Recovery Options > Command Prompt and start Bootrec using the same bootrec.exe /fixmbr as above.Īlthough the MBR problem is relatively easy to repair, it’s still best to be prepared for the worst in case this problem ever strikes again.

After you’ve selected the input method, select Repair your computer, followed by the operating system name. If you’re on Windows 7, you’ll need to follow slightly different steps once you launch into the recovery mode. Next, you’ll land on the troubleshooting screen we saw earlier.Īt this point you can continue to the command prompt as we discussed earlier and run Bootrec. Once you’ve booted into the recovery drive, you should be asked to select a keyboard layout in your language-US English in this case. Lincoln Spector has a tutorial on how to handle setting up your BIOS to boot from USB. Adding to the complication, the way you enter the BIOS (and how you set it up) is not universal. If you don’t have your BIOS correctly configured, the system recovery drive will be of no use. If you’re using a USB drive, your system’s BIOS needs to be set to boot from USB before falling back to any internal drives. This will be either one you created, or a purchased version of the Windows install discs.Ĭreating a recovery drive for Windows will give you peace of mind in case the worst happens. Start by inserting the system repair media into the PC. If you’re running an older version of Windows, or if your Windows 10 PC isn’t launching the repair options, you’ll need to use a recovery drive to fix your MBR.

For more details on these steps, check out our earlier tutorials on how to remove malware from a Windows PC and how to boot into Safe Mode in Windows 10.

If you’re trying to recover from ransomware or some other form of malware, be sure to boot into Safe Mode and then run an antimalware program.

Repair boot manager windows 7