Hard Disk Boot Problem

[GDPurple]

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

[futuretech]

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

[GDPurple]

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.