I've been using Mandrake, Red Hat and Slackware (all at different times, on their own) on my laptop for a while but recently I decided to donate the laptop to my brother, who needed Windows 2000 installed for some of the specialist Windows-only software he uses. However, I've had serious problems getting either Windows or Linux to boot since I last altered the hard disk.

The laptop's hard disk has had a few problems before (the 'end' of the disk is permanently damaged), which I've been able to resolve simply by only partitioning and using the first 80% of disk.

To install Windows I obviously needed to delete the Linux partitions, not having a bootable Slackware disc handy, I used the bootable Mandrake 9.0 CD 1 - I used DiskDrake to remove the Linux partitions and I saved the changes to the disk (i.e. the disk now had no partitions). I then inserted the bootable Windows 2000 CD and created an NTFS partition (making sure to only use the first 80% of the disk) - after the Windows set-up utility had created and formatted the partition and copied a few set-up files to the disk the system had to be rebooted before the installation procedure could continue but after the reboot the hard disk couldn't be booted from (messages along the lines of "No OS found"). I tried to use a Windows 98 bootdisk and the Windows 2000 recovery console to erase the hard disk's MBR before I went through the whole partition/format/install process again - but the hard disk was still not bootable (the single NTFS partition should have been made bootable by the Windows 2000 set-up program).

Since Linux had been working perfectly fine on the laptop (and Lilo was working properly and booting hda1) prior to the attempt to create an NTFS partition and install Windows 2000 I decided to try installing Slackware to see if I'd be able to use Lilo again to start Linux. However, when I tried to install Lilo to the MBR, I was informed that this wasn't possible. I can now only use the laptop by starting with a boot floppy (once I've done this I can use the system and the hard disk as usual).

Can anyone explain what might have caused damage to the hard disk or the MBR? Did I mis-use DiskDrake by telling it to write the partition table with no partitions or could this sort of corruption of the disk simply occured because the drive is on its way out? (The hard disk is about five years old and as I've already mentioned - the end of the disk has some permanent damage.)

Is there anything I can try to restore the MBR so that I can either install Lilo or the Windows 2000 MBR to the disk or is the disk permanently damaged, beyond repair? Given that the situation looks pretty dire, I'm willing to give pretty much anything a go at this stage to get back a working and bootable hard disk (for which I don't think I'll be able to find a replacement).

Thanks.

From a dos prompt

fdisk/mbr

I've tried that using a Windows 98 bootdisk (as stated in my original post). After having used "fdisk /mbr" from the Windows 98 bootdisk and "fixmbr" from the Windows 2000 recovery console the problem persists (i.e. neither Lilo nor Windows 2000 set-up will write to the MBR).

Does anyone here have any suggestions or helpful information relating to the above-stated problem?

Thanks.