Ok, my hard drive's WinXP partition got killed Luckily, I had 'ghosted' the entire drive with Norton Ghost in WinXP onto a modular HD. But, I try to boot off it (both in the main drive and as modular) and instead of the GRUB boot loader, it just hangs there. I can explore the disk in Explorer and in Linux when it's modular and I boot with another HD, and all my files are there, intact. Is there any way I can fix the MBR on this modular drive? I am worried that mesing around with the MBR will kill the parittions (at least that's wha someone told me, not sure if that's on the mark). In any case, I have the Fedora 3 CD here, can I safely, and should I, try to reinstall the GRUB boot loader through that?

Also, this is a modular drive, but I can set BIOS to let me boot off of that. Should I instead move it to the main HD bay - does it really matter?

Thanks!

If you can boot linux from another HD, and read all your files, why don't you just copy them all back from the "Modular" drive (whatever that is)?

These threads/links may help you:

http://p-two.net/hard-drive/hard-drive.html
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=224324

Prior to doing anything, may a boot floppy to enable you to boot linux. May sure you verify it before you do anything. Use it to reboot your computer. Once you are sure it works follow these suggestions.
If you boot the original Windows XP disk, there is an option to restore the MBR. I think it is one of the advanced options if you choose to use the disk to restore the operating. You have the ability to only restore the MBR. This will unfortunately delete grub. You will then use the linux boot floppy to get you into linux. You will then have to restore grub. Do a man on grub. I am at work otherwise I'd help you.)

Good luck

Hi, thanks for the responses. Here's some more detail on this: I had a dualboot, WinXP and Fedora Core 3. I decided I wanted to resize the XP NTFs partition. Bad idea. The computer gave me an error half way through, and now when I try to boot XP, I get a blue screen. Linux, however, still works. I've tried disk doctors and everything, but it's not even reading the Windows partition.

I ghosted the HD a few weeks before this event to my "backup" modular drive. I try to boot it now, but it hangs - I get "GRUB" in the upper left hand corner of a blackened screen, and some ASCII characters in the lower right hand side. So, it doesn't boot. However, I have a third hard drive lying around, that I formatted and put on WinXP. I put in my ghosted drive into the modular slot, and booted this spare 3d HD. Sure enough, I can see all my files etc. on the ghosted modular drive. So I assume it was just the MBR that didn't ghost properly.

So my problem now is getting this to work. I have a hard time with creating boot disks, because the modular "ghosted" drive takes the place of my floppy drive. I could try to move it to the internal drive, but that take a lot of work and eventually I know I'm going to drop the drive or something.

My question was specifically about restoring that MBR, since I assume that's the only thing that's wrong. If I use the Fedora installation CD, can I write over that MBR, and if that fails, will it somehow kill the parition? Is there any chance of that hapenning?

I'd like to just copy over the old Windows partition, but it's NTFS so I can't do it in Linux. I can't boot it, so I can't do it in Windows either.

Oh, when I get the grub menu on the "broken" hd, I try to boot the modular drive (I change (hd0,0) to (hd1,0) but nothing like that works...)

Let me also say that, although I'd like to keep Linux, it's not the end of the world if I don't - I already have a backup of it working 100% on the "broken" HD. Once I get my Windows working again, I can just reinstall it, then ghost it over to take the place of the newly reinstalled one.

Thanks!!