There seems to be something very wrong with my partition table / MBR / whatever.

Just recently I have started to get a lot of file system errors although there are definitely not bad sectors as confirmed by Maxtor diagnostics. Partition magic 8 reports that the drive is BAD and gives this error:

Error #106: Partition didn't begin on head boundary.

ucBeginSector expected to be 1, not 7.

When I go to the recovery console in XP and do 'fixmbr' it says there is something wrong with the MBR but doesn't actually fix it.

I tried something called Partition Table Doctor which said there was a problem but the 'fix' seemed to involve deleting one the partitions which wasn't a great help, and it was a demo anyway.

I have tried to use TestDisk but it doesn't make a lot of sense. Strangely, it says the disc geometry is CHS 24792/255/63 but Maxtor diag says it is 395136/16/63, is this the cause? However I looked at the geometry of another (working) drive and testdisk values also didn't match the maxtor ones.

This is what PartitionInfo says:

====================================================================================================

=======

Disk Geometry Information for Disk 1: 24792 Cylinders, 255 Heads, 63 Sectors/Track

System PartSect # Boot BCyl Head Sect FS ECyl Head Sect StartSect NumSects

====================================================================================================

=======

0 0 80 0 1 1 07 1023 254 63 63 48,596,562

Info: End C,H,S values were large drive placeholders.

Actual values are:

0 0 80 0 1 1 07 3024 254 63 63 48596562

0 1 00 1023 0 7 07 1023 254 63 48,596,631 349,686,849

Info: Begin C,H,S values were large drive placeholders.

Info: End C,H,S values were large drive placeholders.

Actual values are:

0 1 00 3025 0 7 07 24791 254 63 48596631 349686849

Error #106: Partition didn't begin on head boundary.

ucBeginSector expected to be 1, not 7.

Any help is very much appreciated!

Try another IDE/ATA cable, if that doesn’t help remove all partitions and make new ones. Just backup your stuff before proceeding in deleting partitions .