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There is something wrong with my boot sector portion of my disk. I was trying to add another OS to my computer. I used BootMagic 7.0 to try to make a dual boot system with Win 98 and Win 2000(using NTFS) with each OS on a separate HD.

I put BootMagic on the win98 disk since Bootmagic doesn't work on NTFS, so I made that disk the primary drive and changed the Win2000 disk (originally my primary drive with all of my data) to a secondary drive.

WHen I set it up BootMagic recognized win2000. But when I rebooted for the first time I couldn't boot the win2000 disk. After reading the instructions more carefully, I now know that you can't boot Win2000 off a secondary disk

I took out the windows 98 HD and put the the win2000 HD as the primary disk but now my computer won't recognize the drive. I believe the I messed up the boot sector of my harddrive and it won't boot anymore.

I replaced the Win98 OS on the other HD to Win2000 so my computer is running but I want to get at my data files on my other Win2000 HDD. I put the disk with the working OS on master and the other disk with the bad boot sector on slave. Windows 2000 device manager in the control panel sees the slave drive but the I can't see the drive in the "my computer" window.

1. Is there anyway to make the disk bootable without formating the harddive and losing my data?

2. If I can't make it bootable, how can I access the disk when Windows hardware manager recognizes the drive but Windows doesn't.

Thanks in advance.

put in the win2000 cd and choose the repair option and then type in fixboot when it gives you the c prompt.

I tried fixboot. It doesn't work because the computer can't see the drive. I can't get the c:\ prompt.

If I could I would have access to my files and I could reformat the drive.

Any suggestions?

This maybe a windows problem. I think physically the drive is fine. I just can't access it so I will repost in the windows forum.

I'd first start by checking if you didn't actually blow up the partition table on the drive. That would be a very good reason for it not booting anymore. Use a dos (or preferably) a linux bootdisk/cd and use its fdisk utility to check the partition table. You can replace the bootsector there as well if the PT is fine, repost here for more info.

For those intersted, the problem was with the partition table. The drive was marked as Fat (not fat32) buy bootmagic so I couldn't read any data which was originally put on NTFS. Actually I had no way to read the drive even with a dos boot disk. Forge posted that it was hopeless.

The only solution I could figure out was to have a data recovery professional try to re-construct the file system for at least a cool grand so I just formated the damn thing and am moving on. I had about a years worth of e-mail that I would had liked to have kept but nothing really serious.

You know, I once screwed up a partition table by writing a bootsector over it. I managed to recover the data by simply using fdisk (linux) to make the partition again, copy the stuff, and then reformat just to be safe. It would probably have worked for you.

If this teaches you anything, it is critical to backup your stuff periodically onto hard copies like CD-Rs. It is not until you lose everything that you realize how vulnerable your information is when it is on a harddrive. Even backup harddrives used in RAID configurations are subject to wear and tear and could fail as well. Always be prepared for the worst.

Oops. I was following the other thread more closely than this one. I'll try using fdisk (linux) next time. Thanks for the help guys.