Hello, I'm afraid I screwed up my dual boot W98SE/XP system when upgrading a hard disk. Original situation: C: W98SE drive D: data drive E: XP drive F: CD-ROM I needed to upgrade my C: drive. I tried to make an exact copy of the C: partition using MaxBlast (Maxtor utility) and PM6.0, but neither worked. So I resorted to creation of a partition, format/s to make it W98SE-bootable, and xcopy to move my W98SE installation to my new C: drive. Result: my PC boots directly into W98SE, no more boot OS selection menu. I edited boot.ini to point to my XP installation, and ran bootcfg from recovery console, but to no avail. My guess is that I overwrote the XP boot sector on my C: drive, right? How do I recover this? Do I need to run fixboot or fixmbr or both from the recovery console? Is there any risk to my W98 instalaltion when doing so? Alternately, if I choose a repair installation from recovery console, do I need to reinstall all XP applications? Is this a safer option? Thanks in anticipation, your help is greatly appreciated! Johan

You need to boot from XP CD and use the command line repair option to fix this problem. It does not effect either Windows just reinstalls what you removed.

In a dualboot situation the FIXBOOT and FIXMBR commands will not restore the dualboot entirely. I developed the following after inadvertantly formating my ME C drive in a dualboot system. Just substitute 98 where you see ME and modify the sample BOOT.ini to suit your configuration. Good luck. Restore ME/XP Bootfiles Here's how to do it . Boot up into ME. Insert your XP disk into CD-ROM but do not load Just exit the XP setup and leave the disk in the drive. Next use Explorer to locate the following files in the I386 folder of the XP CD: NTLDR and NTDETECT. Copy these two files to the root directory of your C drive. Next you will need to create a file called READ.SCR using notepad and save this file also in root of C drive.and run debug command in MS DOS to create a new bootsect.dos file. the contents of READ.SCR as follows: L 100 N 0 1 N C:\BOOTSECT.DOS R BX 0 R CX 200 W Q N in the first row is replaced by number corresponding to drive letter of the dos partition where ME is loaded. 2=C 3=D 4=E. In my case 2. To run the program open MSDOS and type: debug read.scr press enter. To verify the success check the C root directory and you should have a new file called BOOTSECT.DOS Lastly you need a new BOOT.INI file. Copy the following into notepad and save it as BOOT.INI also in the root directory of your C drive: [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect C:\="Microsoft Windows ME" If this Boot.ini file does not work for you then there's another way to recreate the file. After completing all the other steps except the Boot.ini file restart your system with the XP disk in. when prompted press R for recovery. Setup will detect your existing XP install and you should log in using admin password. Once logged in type FIXBOOT press enter, answer Y. Then type FIXMBR press enter, answer Y. Remove XP CD, reboot. Your dualboot options should be restored

OK, thanks for the replies! I got my XP up and running again, but now I have a different problem... My OS boot selection menu reappeared, and I could again select XP. But... My C: and D: drives are now swapped! Also, I could not boot into W98SE, system files were missing. So, I gave up and reinstalled my original C: drive with the old W98SE installation and the "good" boot sectors. BIOS correctly identifies master and slave disks, all drive letters are correct in W98SE, but in XP my C: and D: drives are still swapped and I can't get them right again! (XP runs off my secondary master, E:) HELP! What's gone wrong, and how can I resolve this??? Thanks in advance, Johan

Copy the following four files from your "Old" C drive to the root directory of your "New" C drive: Boot.ini NTLDR NTDETECT BOOTSECT.DOS