fun with grub and ntfs
 

Hello,

I am using Fedora Core 2, and I was messing around with grub the other day, trying to install it into the MBR, which had been messed up, and I ran the following commands:

root (hd0)
setup (hd0,0)
(me: oh shoot)
setup (hd0)

I wanted to set it up in the MBR of the disk, not in the boot sector of the first partition, which was an ntfs partition with my windows installation on it. Now I am unable to mount this windows partition or boot into windows. I tried running ntfsresize on it to get info about it, and it is not even recognized as an ntfs partition. Is there some way I can fix this?
Thanks,
Joey

Most likely, you won't be able to get this to boot or even be recognized as a 2nd HDD on a Windows machine. My MBR got severely corrupted on my Win2k work laptop and the only way I could get it to work was backing up the MBR from a "good" machine and restoring it to the bad HDD (we use identical machines and images for deployment).

If you have a copy of the MBR (after this incident, I always keep one now) you can try to restore it to the corrupted HDD.

I used Active Partition Recovery to do the restore. There is a bunch of demo software there, and I used the "Reader" to see the directories/files on the HDD.

You can also try to boot into windows using an NTFS boot disk, but I'm not sure that will help. (MS Technet article)

Here's another article with a possible fix: MS Technet article

Short of that, I think you might need to use a file recovery program/service. I haven't used this, but it's recovery freeware, so use at your own risk: PC Inspector Data Recovery

Good luck, and let us know how it turns out.