Fedora Core 2 (dual boot) killed my windows XP partition..URGENT HELP NEEDED!

[Guest]

Here is what happened, I am lost and would really appreciate ANY help.

1) I have a windows xp professional machine and wanted to add a linux to it

2) I added a second hard drive and installed Fedora Core 2 on it

3) Fedora installed fine, and worked, but when I rebooted it could not start X-windows because some kind of incompatibility with using a generic VESA driver with my Radeon 9600 pro

4) I still had my trusty windows partition. So I chose to boot into my windows system through the grub bootloader. The computer would just restart without even apparently attempting to enter windows

5) At this point, I used a boot disk and did an "fdisk /mbr" Rebooted, and got an "no operating system" message

6) Inserted the windows XP cd and built a new MBR from the recovery tools and got a "error loading operating system" message

7) Next, I tried to recover using the windows XP cd and had no luck

I have very important files on that hard drive that I would like to save. If anyone knows how I can save those files without copying them individually to floppy disks I would really appreciate it.

Thank you

 

[wayne]

You can do a parallel install or just stick the hard drive in a second
computer!
It will wipe out documents and settings though if the files are stored
there!

Wayne

Here is what happened, I am lost and would really appreciate ANY help.

1) I have a windows xp professional machine and wanted to add a linux to it.

2) I added a second hard drive and installed Fedora Core 2 on it.

3) Fedora installed fine, and worked, but when I rebooted it could not

start X-windows because some kind of incompatibility with using a generic
VESA driver with my Radeon 9600 pro.

4) I still had my trusty windows partition. So I chose to boot into my

windows system through the grub bootloader. The computer would just restart
without even apparently attempting to enter windows.

5) At this point, I used a boot disk and did an "fdisk /mbr" Rebooted,

and got an "no operating system" message.

6) Inserted the windows XP cd and built a new MBR from the recovery

tools and got a "error loading operating system" message.

7) Next, I tried to recover using the windows XP cd and had no luck.

I have very important files on that hard drive that I would like to save.

If anyone knows how I can save those files without copying them individually
to floppy disks I would really appreciate it.

 

[Guest]

I actually did wipe that second hard drive with the linux partition, and tried to install windows XP on it. However, after it copied some files and went to reboot, the computer froze on the reboot and placed some sporatic characters across the screen with colored backgrounds.

It almost looks like a hardware error.

I dug out a Knoppix CD I had (bootable linux CD) and it started up fine and has a cd writing program. So it looks like I will be able to backup my files.

I hope I can install windows after I backup everything

Thanks for your help!