MBR corrupted when dual booting WINXP and RH 7.3
 

I have WINXP in one primary hard drive and Redhat 7.3 in another hard drive. I forgot exactly what i did, but I sort of installed the GRUB in the MBR of the window harddisk and something like that. But after that, the MBR of the windows harddisk corrupted. The windows harddisk was detected to be like within 20 MB which should be a lot bigger.

Since I want the data in the hard drive, I don't wanna format the drive. Can anybody help me? I have tried a couple of things like FIXMBR, FIXBOOT......I supposed this has worsen my situation...

Well, in fact software like RepoMan or Active@ Partition Recovery would be able to fix my problem since I can view my files in that corrupted harddisk using these software, but I just got the demo version. S**t, but that costs money. Why dun make it open source code. Do anybody know any free software which can recover MBR? THanks alot.

Mo

Is /dev/hda1 mountable?
 

Can you access the data by booting into Linux and mounting the Windows partition?

nop, i was able to do so, but after FIXBOOT/FIXMBR action....
I can't even mount the windows partition....

Mo

corrupt partition table
 

If you cannot mount the partition in Linux then your problem is probably not a corrupt MBR. It is probably a corrupt partition table.

I once fixed a bad partition table entry by using SuSE's install utility to allocate the partition table exactly as it was before I blew it.

You might try that trick using parted:

http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/parted.html

But I warn you that his is a very high risk solution and you may end up even deeper in the hole.