Windows 2000, Tecra 8100 Boot Problem - MBR? (long)

[truckfan]

Long time lurker, first time poster...

Background: this notebook began life as a Win98 machine, on which I installed System Commander 2000. I upgraded to Windows 2000 Professional several months ago and never uninstalled System Commander. Despite an
annoying error message at startup after the OS upgrade (syscmndr.sys not found, choose boot partition or something of that nature), once I selected option "0" Win2k always booted up just fine. It worked fine for several months until...

A few weeks back, I decided to remove all the data and applications from the "D:" drive/partition, which I believe is FAT32 and use the utilities in Win2k to remove the partition. Here is where the trouble started, as I guess I did not know what I was doing.

After the error message (which referenced the boot.ini file and partition numbers 0 and 1, I think), I rebooted the machine and have since not been able to startup Win2k.

Using a Win98 bootup disk, "fdisk" is able to see both drive partitions still. Additionally, OnTrack's Easy Recovery Professional v5.10 is able to see all of the data on the drive. Booting from a Win2k boot disk set that I created from my Win2k Professional CD on my Win98 machine yields
this message: Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration... Disk I/O error: Status = 0001000 NTDETECT failed.

I purchased a copy of Norton Utilities 2001, figuring the fix would be easy since the other utilites see the partitions. No luck so far and Symantec has said that Norton Utilitie cannot be of help, since it was
not installed, with a rescue disk created before this occured.

I created an Emergency Disk set using my Win98 machine. Norton seems to work fine, but I cannot figure out what commands, even based on the documentation, that I am supposed to run. Additionally, I have tried to boot from the CDROM (after changing the PC's BIOS settings to both CDROM
FDD and FDD CDROM) and get the error message "Non-System disk - Insert a
boot diskette and press any key ..."

At this point I am at a loss. I have to believe that since OnTrack's utility sees all of the data, Norton would have been able to get my MBR back in order. No such luck. Are there any utilities out their that
may be helpful or any other tips/tricks anyone can suggest?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!!

Steve Eppinger
President & CEO - Ownersite LLC http://www.ownersite.com

[truckfan]

:::bump:::

[condor]

okay ... .

first thing to do is get rid of the "system commander"

boot from the Windows 2000 CD-ROm and choose Recovery by the "recovery console"

use fixmbr and fixboot (or something..) to restore the boot record..

also make sure your Boot.ini file is setup correctly.