Thanks gore, nihil, Hybr|D and the rest of you for your in detail replies.. Yes gore, i'm trying to tell myself it's going to be ok .

I must have done at least two dozen recovery jobs in the last few years where an overenthusiastic young person has screwed the MBR loading a Linux distro. Now, this is usually a 5 minute job, and the user should be able to do it themselves, but they cannot access the system and they have always mislaid the recovery CD
Well Nihil, I pretty much fit the bill for that guy in this case what can I say

Update:
Seeing as though the HDD in question is in fact Seagate manufactured, I ran a boot diagnostic check called "Sea Tools" (http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/sup...ls/seatooldreg), and it failed the test horrifically with 73 different errors. My next move is to nuke the disk with killdisk, and see if I can get this device back to normal. All I got for now. Not trying to make this thread go to 2011 I swear