How badly did I screw myself (dual boot issues)?

S

shantd

Geek Trainee
I've got a dual boot setup of Vista on C: and XP on D:, one drive. After doing an XP recovery with Norton Ghost, my XP partition wouldn't boot. It complained of a missing ntldr, so I figured I'd do a system repair with my XP CD. I allowed setup to load and it gave me a list of my drives, C: & D:. Unfortunately, it had been a while since I had done this and I thought that I would simply highlight the D: partition and select a "repair" option, but there was no such option. All I could do is install, delete, or reformat, so I rebooted. I guess by allowing the setup process to go that far my boot configuration data was overwritten. Now I've lost my dual boot menu and can't load Vista either.

What's the damage here? Is there any way to "undo" the setup process I inwittingly initiated and return my boot menu/configuration to the way it was before? Thanks a million in advance,

Shant
 
Update:

I think the damage is worse than I thought. I tried to navigate to my C: drive through the Vista boot disk and it flat out can't read anything that's on that drive. It tells me I need to format it. That drive had everything on it. It was partitioned into 3 sections, C: with Vista on it, D: with XP, & E: with hundreds of gigs of backup data. Those partitions are no longer visible, nor any of the data on them. Also, there is a new drive with drive letter X: labeled "Boot", probably created by the XP setup.

How on Earth did this happen!? I never initiated the XP setup! Why did it erase my partition info? Is there any way to get those partitions to read as they were before? If I'm able to dodge this bullet, I damn well may start going to church again...please help!
 
Update 2:

I decided to disconnect the bad drive and connect a brand new drive which is now the only drive on the system. I began to install Windows XP so that I could get back into windows and then run some partition utilities on the bad drive. Unfortunately, after the installation reaches its first restart, I get an error message "error loading windows". Apparently that X: drive is the culprit and it's still there. Even when I disconnect all the hard drives that X: drive is still there, and I believe it contains boot info that's throwing the system off, preventing me from booting anything. Problem is I can't find any way to get rid of it. I try formatting it, it tells me it's a 'right protected disk'. I try to delete it with the Ghost utilities disc, it tells me that my current windows system is on drive X: and deleting it may mess up my system.

So the question now becomes, where on the system is this partition if it's not on any of the hard drives? Is it in the ram? And, most importantly, how do I get rid of it??
 
First of all, You should of had XP then Vista installed.. XP Must come first,Then you would not have any problems.. They have to be installed in order.. You might want to look into Vista Boot Pro.. It just might be able to help you.. Also check out HIREN's Boot CD..
It has all the stuff you need to fix your problem..
 
Thanks for the help there Ghostman, I wish I knew that you needed to install XP first. That said, the dual boot system was working just fine for several months. The reason I got the ntldr error was because I tried to restore a backup of XP via ghost which pre-dated when I had my dual boot properly setup & configured. But even then my dual boot menu was still intact at that point & I could still boot Vista. The problem occured after I ran the XP setup disc to try to repair my XP partition. Even though I never actually initiated the installation, something was done which altered my boot configuration...maybe the MBR? But does this account for why dos and Vista can no longer read the drive altogether & request that I format the disc? Do you think fixmbr would correct this and return the dual boot menu?

I have vistabootpro but I'm unsure how I apply it to this situation. Don't I need to get windows and/or dos to read that drive correctly before I can do anything with vistabootpro or hiren's boot cd?
 
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