Hi all,

Sorry for long post, but I think it is importent to give you all the details.

I screwed up my RedHat 9 installation and decided to remove it alltoghter using partition magic to re format the linux partitions.

When booting onto the HD, I got the minimal GRUB command line.

In the mean time went out and bought another HD and installed XP on it and made it the primary HD with my corrupt HD as the secondary.

When loading XP on my new HD, the new HD is c: (obviously) and the old HD is F:

I can access data on F: but really want historical e-mails etc, so decided to try and fix F:

Read up (in this forum!) and found out I needed to boot to XP CD ROM, run recovery mode then run FIXMBR to restore the XP Master Boot Record.

So I changed BIOS to boot only from IDE1, ran BOOT MENU from start up, and booted onto XP CD and entered recovery mode.

When this starts is asks "Which installation do you wish to fix? C:WINDOWS or D:WINDOWS"

First question is C: IDE0 or IDE1? IS D: CDROM?

When trying D: it asks for Admin Password. Seeing as I do not have one I pressed enter, and it cam back with comand promt D:WINDOWS> I ran FIXMBR from here and It came up with a long caution stating the followng:

"*CAUTION*

This computer appears to have a non-standard or invalid master boot record

FIXMBR may damage your partition tables if you proceed

This could cause all the partitions on the current hard disk to become inaccessible

If you are not having problems accessing your drive, do not continue

Are you sure you want to write a new MBR?"

Throwing caution to the wind put in Y.
"The new master boot record had been sucsessfully written".

Great. Exit to reboot, and back to the grub command line:-( What am I doing wrong? Am I actually writing a new MBR to the CD ROM?

BTW, tried the C:WINDOWS as well, but insists on a admin passowrd that I do not have.

Disconnect the new HD, put the old HD back into Primary Master, boot from the WinXP cdrom into the recovery console and try "fixmbr" again.

If that didn't work, put the new HD back into Primary master and old hd in Slave/secondary, boot into the new xp installation, edit c:\boot.ini (hidden by default) and try add the following
reboot and you should then be able to load the old installation

During the install of WinXP, or the setup if you bought a PC off the shelf. On the same screen it which you specify the computer's NETBIOS name, you specify the admin password. Thats the password it wants. If that jogs your memory.

Netizen