allright here is my situation: I have a western digital 40 GB IDE as my c drive, and its formatted in FAT32. Then i have an 80 GB SATA ( NTFS )as my D drive. Windows XP is running off the D drive. I wanted to dualboot Suse 9, so i used partition magic to split up the C drive. It booted fine even at this point. Then when i tried installing Suse, i decided to stop before installing. It had NOT started, it was waitign for me to press OK. since linux and my ATI card arent real good friends, the bottom of my screen was chopped off, and there was no way to quit normally. So I just reset the box. I guess this was my major mistake. Now when i try booting, i get a "Disk Error, press any key to restart" error. This seemed like a BIOS error almost, but not quite, so i booted up my parition magic rescue disks, and took out the split C patririon, and reverted it to the old settings. When i did an error scan in this little prog, it said "Improperly Dismounted Partition Error," but of course it would not fix the error. The prog seemed to read the 2 discs PERFECTLY. So i rebooted, and now i get this error when trying to boot, "NTLDR is missing, press Ctrl+Alt+Delete" So i said, ah well now i might be able to fix it with my Windows Recovery console off the CD. WRONG, even booting up off the win XP cd gives me a blue screen, with a "7B" error - "Inaccessable Boot Device" After that i tried bootign up a Win 98 floppy. when i tried running a sys c: command, it said "no system detected". Then i ran FDISK /status, and it seemed to recongnize a FAT32 partition on my c: drive, with the correct total size, but it wouldnt read anything esle, like free space, or anything like that. All this time, mind you, the BIOS is looking at my D: drive to boot off of, so does that mean my MBR is on the d drive ? Well my real question is, will low-leveling the D drive, and reinstalling winXP on it, fix it ? BTW, i booted up KNOPPIX, and it seemed to read both prtitions fine, in fact i can use KNOPPIX to backup stuff from both HDs, if the freaking network drivers would work. if you have any comments, please email me, as i might not have the patience to check this forum a lot.... wetfeet2000@innutech.com

"i might not have the patience to check this forum a lot.... This line says it all... why post a query if you can't be bothered coming back for the replies. The object of a forum is to promote discussion so that others may also learn. Perhaps you would like someone to come around and do a repair for you!

no, its not like that, im just pissed that i cant get this thing working. ive been a member fo this forum since like 2001. i have replied to some ppls problems, its not like im a total leech. im sorry for putting that last line, what im mainly concerned about is, all my important data is on my C drive. I am thinking of low leveling the D drive, but im not sure if it will still work, and if i will still be able to boot and see my C drive after installation. BTW, i unplugged my C drive, and i got the same error, so its gotta be something screwed up on the D drive. but if i low level it, will it have any affect ? ( is the MBR placed on teh C drive NO MATTER WHAT ? or in my case is it on the D drive, and low leveling it should take care of all the problems ? )