Hard Disk Boot Problem

I am currently struggling with a hard disk drive problem that I have not seen before.

A bit of history first - the customer has been trying to install a dual boot Win98/Win XP system on their PC. Basically they have made a mess and the PC won't boot up at all, which is where I come in.

The system has 2 hard drives a c: drive 17Gb with the OS & applications and a d: drive 40Gb for data.

With just the 17Gb HDD plugged in the system boots fine to Windows 98, as soon as you plug in the second drive then I get a message "NTLDR is missing".

Doing a bit of detective work using FDISK I found the following; FDISK always sees the D: drive as drive 1 and the C: drive as drive 2. As the active partition has to be on drive 1 the PC won't boot when the d: drive is plugged in.

So basically the question is how do I get FDISK to see the C: drive as drive 1 and not drive 2? I would guess that it's something to do with the MBR, but I have never come across this problem before so apart from wiping and reformatting both drives (starting to look more and more appealing!) I don't know what to try

Just a list of the things I have tried.

- ensured that the c: is master and the d: slave.
- double checked jumper confgurations and tried master/slave and Cable Select configurations
- wiped the MBR on D: drive
- Tried FDISK /MBR on both drives

All to no avail

Any suggestions?

Graeme

NTLDR missing would appear for sure if you have wiped the master boot record.
Try booting from the XP cd and fix boot.
http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;Q314057

I only wiped the MBR on the D: drive which is not the boot drive and not set to Active in FDISK.

I'll try the suggestions in the Microsoft KB article but I think the problem is in the MBR.