There is no MBR at all on a brand new hard drive. In the absence of any
MBR, all Microsoft OS installation setup programs (and this goes back to
MS-DOS) will create one. And in that situation you have a reasonable
assurance that if the hardware is not defective, the MBR won't be
corrupt (note, defective hardware other than the drive or drive port can
result in drive corruption .... defective memory, for example).



Jacques E. Bouchard wrote:
> Barry Watzman <WatzmanNOSPAM@neo.rr.com> wrote in news:h23jcr$o4k$1
> @news.eternal-september.org:
>
>> I think that is incorrect; I think that a clean install does NOT
>> necessarily create a new MBR.
>>
>> You have some options when you do an install; you can use an existing
>> partition (with either a "full" format or a "quick" format) or you can
>> delete and/or create new partitions. But NONE of those actions replaces
>> the MBR, which is a portion of the drive itself and not of any one
>> particular partition (each partition has it's own boot record, but those
>> are separate from the MASTER boot record).
>
> But what if you start from scratch on a brand new, sealed HD, as I did? How
> could the MBR be corrupted on that?
>
>
> jaybee