Wrong boot order

[gEnEsIsE]

Ok you wont believe what i did this time hahaha, now i know im a very curious kid...well here is the situation im in...

i messed my pc up again but its ok cause i was gonna do a recovery anyway to rearrange a few things but i need to back-up my data now and thats easy (ill just get my friend's computer over and back it all up)...but thats not the problem. here is what happened and what i want to do...

I had a problem with my partitions and wanted to combine them and i didnt get to it because as i said was curious and saw a icon under the partition magic folder and it was like hqboot.exe or something and i click onto it and it shows 2 IDs (my 2 hard drives) and without looking at what it said i clicked 2 and what it did was change the location of the boot to disk 2 and now i cant get into my old one, i tried switching the cables to set the 2nd disk as primary.
anyone know how to undo this and make it boot correctly?

ps.. i was in BIOS and weird thing was boot 1 was set to CD then floppy and disk was 3rd, i changed it so that disk was 1st then cd and then the floppy but no luck


Now a real PS. i dont know how many of you are still left here but its me, uh scripty ...havent been here for quite some time heh...well thanks in advance for any help and replies

[phishphreek]

You didn't list your operating system.

If you are using 2K or XP, then get your OS CD out.

Boot to the recovery console

They type

fixmbr

It create a master boot record to your primary hard drive.

If you are using

Microsoft Windows 95
Microsoft Windows 98
Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition

Use a boot disk to get to a command prompt and then type

fdisk /mbr

Both of those will rewrite the master boot record for you.

[gEnEsIsE]

ill try it but im not so sure it will work bc i have a downloaded winxp pro, if thats the only way to do it (which i highly dont think it is) but all i want to do is back data up so even if i cant do it i still have to back the data up using a friend's computer.

hey thanks and good being here again...ull see more of me when i get this sh*t together

[MURACU]

It sounds like you changed the active partion on your machine.
Try to boot with a disk in dos run fdisk and see which partion is active.
you can also try with a dos version of partion magic

[gEnEsIsE]

ok here is what i've done so far...

i downloaded a MSDOS boot disk and i tried what you did and it gave me no message that the command was wrong so i restart and now it only says Missing Operating System
...next on my list is to get the windows xp boot disks and try it with that ?

[MURACU]

if you get a no os message after activating a different partion it means the partition is not bootable. You might just need to find the original boot partion and reactivate it.

[gEnEsIsE]

i did this when i booted with the MSDOS disk..

1st: command: fdisk /mbr and it worked cause there was no error msg
2nd: i checked the disk out a bit with command dir and saw there was a fdisk.exe so i launched it and it took me to a menu with a few options and information, yes it also had some stuff with partitions and activating something, cant remember now (im at school right now)

i never had such a problem so im thinking is there something else i can get that would make this easier to fix, like a partition magic boot version or would the xp setup boot (6 disks) help me?...also i did play around with those active partitions in DOS boot so i guess i would have to get that back to normal somehow...it all looks messed up though, but i think ill do that first and then go to other boot disks or something...and if that dont go ill just take my disks out and back it up onto my friend's computer and then hope that my recovery disks would get it back to normal (speaking of my primary drive)