I have to hard drives, hda is a 160 GB and hdb is a 60 GB. I installed Win XP on hda, got it up and running, and then I installed Suse 9.1 on hdb. What I wanted to do is install the bootloader on hdb mbr, save the windows mbr on hda, and just boot from hdb. The thing is, when Suse was installing it overwrote the mbr on hda, so no more windows mbr. Now here's the problem: I want to take Suse out and put in Slackware, but I don't want to have to reinstall windows to get the mbr back. But it gets worse. Today I sat down and opened up partition magic to look at my partition table, and I find that hdb is completely corrupted (it said something about disk geometry and the entire drive is marked BAD), so I don't know if I'll be able to get back into windows if I need to reboot.

Anyone have any ideas? I don't want to start anything, find out it's the wrong course of action, and lose a whole bunch of data (again). And I sure don't want to reinstall windows again, I just got it to work semi-properly.

Put in your windows CD and boot in recovery mode. Log in as the adminstrator on the partition it's on, if you didn't set a password, then just hit enter. The look around help, but it should be just "FIXMBR". That will make windows rewrite the MBR. Then install slackware.

Worked like a charm, thanks for the assist.