Okay, the un-thinkable happened to me. Probably a simple endeavor for most of you, but for me I never encountered this problem so theres a jackass first for everything right ? .. heh.. I was installing Open SuSE live on my box, which i planned to dually partition with XP home. The monitor that I have, flickers quite a bit, it's an old piece of trash. So that led me to unplugging it more than once and plugging it back in (the monitor).. The result was nil. So i physically shut off the box during the install, **YES I KNOW**, dumb....... So i'm guessing that I caused some cross linkage problems with the hdd, and messed up the MBR altogether, and when i fire up the machine now, I get "No active OS Partition !, insert cd or reboot" .. [I really hope you guys don't break out the flame throwers on this thread ]

Things i've tried thus far:
1.) Seeing as I have a Vista recovery disk only, and not an XP disk, I fired up the Vista disk and skipped the install, went to recovery mode and got the command prompt open. I first tried fixboot, and fixmbr, which were to no avail, I thought they were available on vista too but i guess i was wrong. I tried scandisk, which didn't work either.. So finally, I ran chkdsk /f /r and let that run. It had alot of listings of bad sectors on which it claimed it repaired when that finished.

2.) I had a system suite recovery disk which came with my laptop (vista), but it stated dually compatible with XP, vista, 7. So I went to the partition table, and on my hdd (79.6 GB), it states that 7.9 GB have bad sectors. "Wow". Even after running chkdsk and repairing all the bad sectors, I still have 7.9 GB of nil sectors ? I tried toggling the NTFS partition as "active" on the MBR, but it will *NOT* allow me to because of the bad sectors.. Now I have no problem stating myself as a Newbie on here. This problem I thought i could fix easily, but i'm leaving my ego at the door on this one. It took me a lot of hours of playing around before deciding to write this thread.. Help AO