Emergency - Can't Boot
 

Ok, I installed Mandrake 10 on a second partition from Win XP (NTFS). When I wanted to boot back into XP, I noticed that the Mandrake lilo boot loader wouldn't load Win. I changed to GRUB, and it too, wouldn't load Win. I played around with some GRUB settings, before I loaded & installed BootIt NG from a floppy to try to boot Win. It wouldn't work. So, as a last resort, I deleted BootIt, and booted up the recovery console on the Win CD and tried both fixmbr and fix boot. DOS says the new MBR was written successfully, but when trying to boot it, the bios won't and gives "An error loading OS." So, now I can't think of any ideas on how to load Windows (and now I can't load Linux either since GRUB is gone). In the recovery console, DOS can "see" my Windows "C" partition and can log into it, just not boot it.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to boot Win from my predicament? If nothing can be done, I guess I'll boot Knoppix and try to backup my files from the NTFS partition over the network. Since I can't load Mandrake either, is there anything I could try from Knoppix?

Sorry for bothering you with my newbie emergency, but thanks for any help anyone might be able to provide!
-Jaws

how is the drive partitioned?

The Windows XP (NTFS) partition was showing up as HDC0, but under Knoppix, it's showing up as HDC1. I've now deleted Mandrake and it's partition, so it's now completly empty. So, I think, there's now only 1 partition, HDC1. I'm running Knoppix off a CD.

It can't be hdc0 because partition number start from 1, is there another disk on hda/b (primary master/slave)? is the bios set to boot from hdc?

Demonbane, actually grub starts numbering at 0.
If you can get into windows (e.g. with a bootdisk - try www.bootdisk.com or something) try using:

fdisk /mbr

to replace the master boot record and hopefully get back into booting windows.

Yea i know, was refering to Linux device nodes.
Doing "fdisk /mbr" is the same as doing fixmbr(more or less) in recovery conole, so it probably won't help.