Invalid System disc error after formatting

[Richter]

I upgraded my mobo, etc and added a SATA drive. I put in the new SATA drive and installed XP on it. The new drive (with the NEW OS) was labled as F: and my old IDE drive became C: (The IDE drive had an OS on it and I planned on formatting it later after I got all my stuff off of it.)

Anyway everything was working fine until I formatted the C: drive (other than it asked me at boot which OS I wanted to boot to) Now the PC says invalid system disc when I restarted it. The OS was booting just fine off of the F: drive before so I didn't think tinkering with C would effect it.

what do I do do get my PC to boot again?

THANKS

 

[D1gger]

While you did install the OS to the F: drive, it probably wrote its boot sector onto your C: drive. So when you formatted C: it no longer has a boot sector to tell it to go to F: for the OS. You will need to do a repair install to either re-write the boot sector (FIXMBR) on C:. If you change the boot sequence to make your F: drive your first bood drive, you will still have to re-write the boot record, and by changing the drive letter you may screw up some of your other program references.

 

[Richter]

do i just reinstall over the top of the other install? or is there a simpler way?