I haven't used this site in ages, and I can't believe I remembered my old username and password.. anyway, I have a new problem that occured yesterday when trying to install Fedora on my hdb drive..

So basically I have 2 hds..

hda is NTFS partition with WinXP
hdb was a formatted NTFS drive.

I began installing Fedora and got to the part where you need to make some partitions.. so I set it up manually making hdb an ext3 and partitioned a section for swap on there as well.

The installation seemed to fail after a while saying something about not formatting the drive properly and that I had to restart. (or something about invalid partition table.. or both..)
After I restarted the system and the Fedora installation began to start again it gave me an error saying that there was an error with hdb.. I can't quote the error, that was yesterday and my memory slips me.

In short, it said that hdb had a huge problem, and on the partition screen that followed, only my hda drive was listed. Not a good thing. I cancelled the installation and tried to boot into my NTFS windows, but it wouldn't let me. It didn't give me any problems, just a blank black screen. (Almost as if the MBR had a problem)
So I took an old XP cd and tried to get into the recovery console to fix the MBR, however after the boot cd "detected hardware configuration" it dropped me to a blank screen again.

Ok.. so I'll go through the process and install a boot manager on hda.. that should fix the MBR problem.. so I booted into Fedora again, and instead of moving forward, it froze at a blank screen again shortly after the GUI was about to load.

I quickly disconnected the hdb drive and tried booting with just the hda in there. Still the same problem.

I took out the hda and backed up the data on another computer (all the data was there and in tact). I ran recovery console on THAT computer and selected the slave drive as the default windows and used the FIXMBR and FIXBOOT tools on the drive. Usually this fixes most MBR problems for me. Formatted the drive to NTFS again (not the quick way) and popped it into the other box. I hoped to see an error about no OS or something about having nothing to boot from, but instead the same problem happened again.

When I get home, I'll probably try making the hdb drive master and the hda slave.. if I can at least get into the linux or windows boot cd, I MIGHT be able to install windows onto the hda drive.

If someone's experienced this before or knows what I'm talking about.. and how to fix this.. please give me a hint.

It does sound like an MBR problem, so maybe someone can recommend a good MBR editing utility and how it can benefit me in this situation?

Thanks for the help

Use rescue disk. Slax or Knoppix. Try low level formatting . Use cfdisk for that and remove all partitions altogether from drive with damaged MBR. Don't forget to write the partition table at the end

Tried that, but I still have the same problem. Formatting went well, and it's partitioned correctly.. still the same problem though.

I'll try a few more things, but I'm quickly running out of ideas.

EDIT: Alright.. problem fixed, but not quite fixed the way I imagined it to be..

The MBR on the hda is scrap.. No matter how many times I write a new one, it still says that it's invalid.

What I did, was take the hdb drive and made it the master.. the hda drive became the slave. Popped in a boot disk and it loaded great! So it WAS the MBR on the hda that was messing it up. Still don't know why it's not working.

So I tried a new install, and selected the hda (now hdb) as the primary installation drive.... and it seemed to work great. Formatted correctly and installed the files correctly. As soon as I reset the system to complete the installation same problem. Thusly, the MBR wasn't fixed for some reason.

I went back again and installed on the new hda (old hdb drive) and it works great. The other drive works nicely as a slave with no OS on it, but as soon as you try to boot to it, no luck.

I'm still looking for a nice way to edit that MBR if possible to figure out what's wrong or to reset it so that I can go back to using my 200GB as the primary instead of the 80GB I'm using now.