blinking cursor after XP Pro Setup

[Jill]

I think I'm going to cry...

I had to rebuild a relative's HD with Window XP Pro because his
installation had been taken over by spyware. One of the symptoms was
he couldn't even copy and paste anything. I connected a second HD as
slave to the master HD. Booted off Bart's PEDisk to copy and paste
his documents from the master HD to the second HD. Then I booted off
the XP CD to run setup on the master HD. At this point, the second HD
is still attached as a slave. Ran setup on the master HD. I didn't
delete any partitions (there were two. One labeled IBM_Preload (75GB)
and the other 186MB of something), just chose to install on the
existing partition (IBM_Preload) and format NTFS. Finished the
installation, installed programs and copied data over from the second
HD back to the master. Ran Windows Update and shut it down -
remember, the second HD has been attached this entire time as a slave.
Before turning it back on, I disconnected my slave HD. Turned it
back on and now I only get a blinking cursor. I'm unable to boot from
the HD and CD. I went into the BIOS and changed the boot order around
several times, even setting it to default settings. Still no boot. I
was able to boot from WinXP boot floppies so I could at least get into
the Recovery Console from the CD, ran fixboot. It says it fixed the
boot sector, but I'm still unable to boot from the CD and HD. I've
triple checked all my connections on the motherboard. I even put in a
completely different HD with an existing WinXP image and it boots from
it, so I know there is nothing wrong with cables or pins. Can anything
help me figure out what went wrong?

 

[Jetro]

fixmbr

 

[Jill]

fixmbr

thanks Jetro. I tried fixmbr last night after posting this message
and unfortunately it still didn't work. I was able to hook the HD up
to another computer and boot into windows with it being a second HD.
Then I went into Disk Management and deleted the funky IBM_Service
partition that was there. Still wasn't able to boot, but after a BIOS
update I was at least able to boot from CD again. Ran chkdsk and
another thorough HD utility and I'm finally led to believe that I've
got a bad HD. When booting from CD and running XP setup again there
is some serious delay in finding that HD. So another 8 hours of my
life I'll never back worrying over this stupid HD. Ahh, the joys of
being a computer technician...

Jill