FDISK: Anyone that is good with fdisk please help!

[Josep]

Ok, i have winxp installed on 2 hard drives, don't ask why, i just do. I was trying to get rid of the selection on startup to decide which operating system(they were both the same choice, just a different hard drive) So i put in a win98 boot disk and ran fdisk, I deleted the Non-dos partition from the c drive, which is the drive i don't want, and when i restarted, it gave me the error: NTLDR is missing, then it said to press control-alt-delete to restart. SO i went back to fdisk and created primary dos-partition back to the hard drive that i didn't really want, and NOW when i restart it says: Missing Operating system, ok, so its not detecting the os on my c drive, but i don't want it to! i have another operating system installed on the d drive, and i want it to run off that one! please help! in any way!

[Malcolm]

ok, stick back in that old Win98 start up disk, get to da prompt (DOS Prompt with out CD-ROM support) and type this:

fdisk /mbr

this will reset the master boot record on your hard disk and should make everything all right and well, but make sure that the partiton that you want to boot is active first, you can do this by choosing option 3 (i believe) from the fdisk menu.

Good luck

[Josep]

DAMMIT! for some gay reason that did not work, it still give me the same error message: Missing operating system

[Eagle]

Argh, you messed up. The problem is even if your booting onto an OS thats on the D: drive. The system files (command.com, msdos.sys, io.sys) and a few other configuration files for multiple operating systems are located on the default boot drive which is C: If you delete these, it has no clue where to look for them. They have to be on the root directory of the C: drive regardless of where the OS is installed. My reccomendation switch your HD cables around, but then the system files still won't be there, so it would be best to reinstall after doing that. You should always have your primary OS on the C: drive to eliminate other hassles and complications, If this means opening the computer and switching HD cables, I'd strongly reccomend doing so before you install the OS.

[rob in london]

if you have an operating system on a secondary hard drive, then you would have to either swap the drive cables( like eagle said) so its the primary master, or see if you can change the bios settings to load it where it is. theres still no guarantee it would find the os, in fact it probably wont, it sounds like youve deleted the boot loader, which would have been on the first drive anyway. you shouldn't fuck about with fdisk unless you know what your doing, but i suppose your learning that the hard way heh.

the only other thing you might try would be to find a more powerful partition table editor than m$'s fdisk and put the partition back *exactly* where it was before, assuming you know what type it was and havent formated the space. good luck, you'll need it

[Slougi]

Just boot from the xp cd and select repair installation. I have xp on D: with no probs.

[Eagle]

Oh, I forgot about the repair thing. But I'd still switch the drives around.

[Slougi]

Eagle: having XP on D: actually is a good thing, it confuses most virii and trojans that are around.

[Josep]

hehe, yea well i just formated 'em both hehe, ooo well, i kinda needed to do that anyway, yes i am in the midst of learning, and yes in a hard way its ok tho, everything i could have wanted was pretty much backed up on cd's i really don't know which one i should put the os on, you guys are kinda confusing, eheh, but i'll probably put it on d, or switch cables around and make my D one the C one

[Slougi]

Put it on D:
From what I gather it's the faster drive. And as I said preiously it blocks out almost 60% of the virii and trojans which look for c:\windows.