MBR Issue with WinXP

[Viperoni]

I previously had Hard Drive A running WinXP and Mandrake.

Then I added HD B (36gb Raptor if you must know 😛) and installed WinXP on that.
However, I didn't disconnect HD A.....

Now when I disconnect HD A, the BIOS can't find any device to boot to... it appears as though the MBR is on HD A when I need it to be on HD B.

Also, I can't format the partition where WinXP is on HD A, and also, I seem to have completely lost the mandrake install; the linux bootloader doesn't come up as it usually did, now I get a Windows bootloader asking me if I want to load the new WinXP or the old one. That's it.


So far I've tried to get the WinXP CD to go into recovery console, however it keeps whining it can't find HD B, but when I press F6 to load SATA drviers, it never brings up the prompt to do so.

So.... how do I fix my MBR?

 

[Viperoni]

I'm going to try isntalling gentoo 2004.3 and see if by its installing of its own bootloader might possibly resolve the issue. Otherwise... I might just have to reinstall WinXP 🙁

 

[futuristicmonkey]

Did you try booting with the XP cd, then, when in the recovery place (not the automated thing - its the one where you press "R" when it asks you how you want to install XP) and type: FIXMBR

That should fix everything right up. 🙂

 

[Viperoni]

I tried both FIXMBR and FIXBOOT, neither did the trick.
I've already reinstalled XP and I'm on the way to getting the rest of my stuffs reinstalled.

Now to pick a Linux distro that has USB KB support enabled out of the box... gentoo 2004.3 didn't seem to have it, and I seem to have the LiveCD's even though I thought I DL'd the regular version...
Next on the list of distro's to try it Fedora Core 3, but I'd rather get gentoo working.