What did I do???

[cheyenne1212]

I have a computer that I have two Hard drives in. ONes a WD 80 GB partitioned into 70 gig, and 10 gig. and the other a WD 10 GB. I thought I installed Red Hat LInux 7.3 on the 10 gig hard drive, but somehow I put it on my 80 gig hard drive that has Windows XP Pro on it.

In hopes that somehow Linux installed on my other non windows partion I tried to boot to Windows on the 80 Gig hard drive. However, I get an error message saying "grub Hard drive error".
I booted up to the Windows Recovery console and it showed that I had a folder on my hard drive which was c:\windows.
I am in the process of installing Windows XP on the 10 gig partion on the 80 gig drive in hopes that I can transfer all my files there.

My question is, is there someway that I can still get my old Windows XP install back? I'm thinking that maybe my master boot record is switched or something like that. I don't know how I managed to do this but somehow I did. Anyhelp would be appreciated.

[update]
Ok I have Windows Installed on the other partion now, and I see my other Windwos Install. It even lets me boot to it. So I am now on my old install. HOwever, no I have to Windwos Installs on the computer and I'm afraid that if I delete the one I'm gonna be back to the "grub Hard Disk error". I know theres something I can do to make the computer boot from the old install instead of the new one. Right now as it is I have to select which Windows I want to boot. What do I need to do to not have it ask me which Windows I want to boot to?
[update]

[thesecession]

The problem is that your boot.ini file still has the code to display the menu at boot. You need to fix the boot.ini file. You can boot from a floppy and modify the boot.ini file. Or you can boot from a floppy and, at the prompt, type fdisk /fixmbr. This will fix your master boot record and boot.ini.

[cheyenne1212]

Thank you. I'll give that a shot.

[AciDriveHB]

Actually since you installed Linux on the system, wouldn't you have to go through the Linux installer to fix the boot setup? Because grub is controlling bootup so you can switch to either Windows or Linux. And isn't that setup at the very start of the drive, or the 1024 sector or something like that? Then if you select Windows it would use the boot.ini?

I'm not a big Linux person, just a few thoughts. Seeing as none of the other Linux big wigs have posted here yet, thought I would offer my two cents.

Just a thought...
~AciD

[cdre]

Well install partion-magic promote the logical drive to a primary drive & dont forget to make the boot drive active.Get a copy off boot-magic ass well it will help alot.