LinuxQuestions.org - SuSe 8.0 and Win 2000 boot problems

I've run SuSe 8.0 Professional installer on my system which originally had Windows 2000 installed.

The Win2k was on C: as NTFS, also on the same drive was a seperate partition "D:" which was FAT32.

I installed a seperate hard drive onto the secondary IDE chain and formatted it as FAT32. Before the SuSe install, it showed up on the Windows 2K system as "F:"

When I ran the installer, I selected the defaults and it installed onto "F:" and modified the MBR on the "C:". (Thus, the only modification to my "C:" drive should have been the MBR...)

Once SuSe was installed, it wouldn't boot the Windows 2K install. A call to SuSe informed me that the "lilo" program could not boot Win2k because it's MBR format was propritary and therefore wouldn't work. (Why this isn't made clear in the manual or why it default to this setting when doing an install seem like a serious flaw to me. Yes, I did look through the installation part of the manual and it even suggests that everything should work with Win2k /XP and that I should have just used the intaller defaults as I did.)

Long and short, is I now have a non-bootable Win2k installation on my "C:" drive. How do I fix it? I really don't need the Linux, but do need the Win2k.

SuSe suggested using the Win2k repair consule and running "fdisk /MBR" which is fscked since "fdisk" is not a Win2k command. The options are FIXBOOT and FIXMBR. I've run FIXBOOT, but it didn't make a difference. I started to run FIXMBR, but got the:

"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?"

error and didn't proceed. (one site ( http://www.jsifaq.com/SUBF/TIP2800/rh2839.htm ) said to ignore this error and proceed anyways, but don't want to unless I get some confirming info. )

I don't want to loose the data on the C: and D: partion of that hard drive, so I haven't done anything.

What should I do?

In the worst case senario, can I take the drive out and take it to a friends house with a running version of Win2K and at least read the data??