I have/had a dual boot sytem with Windows 98 on my C drive and Windows XP on an E drive. (Same hard drive. the drive also has 2 other data partitions). I wanted to upgrade my C drive to Windows XP and keep the dual boot situation. I wanted to use the C drive as a kind of business use with Office 2007 on it and keep the E drive as kind of a entertainment drive but with Office XP on it. I had a drive image of my E drive as a backup.

The I did a stupid, stupid thing. Did I say stupid.

I figured let me save some time and put the E image on my C drive.

Bad very Bad. It no longer can boot. I guess the boot record was removed etc.

I don't want to go into all the boring details but I've tried the recovery mode and tried to rebuild, add, etc the MBR. No luck. I'm not concerned about the C drive data. And I'm pretty sure the E partion is still there, but I don't want to loose this partition and all the associated programs installed.

It also appears that my BIOS is not recognizing the drive. Everything worked fine before my mistake.I've checked jumpers. BIOS doesn't see the drive when I use autodetect. I will check the cable too.

What should I do first? Do I need to do something with fdisk?

Help!!!!!!!!

did you format c? if so your right you killed the boot record. boot from your xp cd and see if it sees the drive. If it does format c again and install xp to that partition. Once installed simply add a boot entry for the other partition to your boot ini.(control panel system advanced start up and recovery and edit) simply change the partion 0 or a 1 and it should find it or whatever number along your partition table it is

I will try again. I did format C from the Recovery mode. It started to install XP. I'm using an uprade XP disk. So it asked me for a previous qualifying disk (95, 98, ME, etc). When I put in my 98 disk it wouldn't recognize it. But I will try again with a different 95 CD. I have both and OEM disk and a 95 upgrade disk.

Thanks