Is there any was to recover from this. When trying to boot from one of 2 BeOS partitions on the same HD, I get: Loading BeNew Boot sector signature not found. Thanks

Can you mount the non working install from the working install? My question would be how can one boot and yet the other not find the boot area??? What boot manager are you using? Beos' Bootman or grub? A normal solution would be to make a copy of the sort of working mbr and then try running bootman again or maybe even the command makebootable.

In DriveSetup for this partition it lists it as "unknown" file system. I see the volume name in the Tracker, but when I try to mount it, I get an alert "Error mounting volume. (General OS error) The "makebootable" command gives the error that the device must be mounted to be made bootable.

No I can't mount this partition even though I see it in Tracker. I get an alert error saying "Error mounting volume. (General OS error)". Also makebootable command didn't work saying volume needs to be mounted. Running bootman off another running HD that I'm now using doesn't even offer either of those partitions for a boot volume.

My guess is there is some overlapping of the partitions. Might try to get Ranish on a floppy or ultimate boot cd and see if there are partition problems??? If the partitions are correct then other issues such as too fast of bios setup or maybe poor quality ide cables have caused this. A tip at betips talks about using high quality cables. I know most machines require the most slow bios settings for beos. Can't say what caused this. You can use diskprobe to get data off maybe. Might have to do a cat command from raw drive to file. I suspect the data is lost unless ranish offers a solution.

Try testing the hard disks, hey68you. The hdds could be failing. I have a large crate of failing hdds. I take no chances with a failing hdd and they go into that box straight away after I copy out data that I want to keep. This utilty here from hitachi (drive fitness test) works on all manufacturers and is the best one I've tried. Just choose the quick test. If the operation comes back other than no problems your hdd could be the problem. http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Couple more possibilities...check the slave master pins are correctly set, and if the drive has ever been formatted on a mac, you'll also get this error..if that is the case try deleting all the partitions in fdisk on a win PC, and start with a fresh install on the drive..