A lot of problems with my multibootings.

[timekeeper]

Hi,

Whenever my computer boots up it either shows the boot menu (for XP Pro, Longhorn 4051, another older XP Pro) but I find that if I don't hold one of the arrow buttons it just shows System Disk failure. I have checked the floppy drives and CD drives but there are nothing in them.

Also, is there anyway to completely wipe the MBR and start over because I have tons of junk and deleted OSs on the menu. For some reason when I select MS Longhorn the screen just goes black and then the computer restarts. I have tried safe mode but it just does the same thing.

I want to wipe everything except my main XP installation and start over.

I have a Primary Master 80GB maxtor hard drive and a Quantum Fireball as slave with various OSes on each physical disk. I have 2 partitions on each disk.


If anyone could help me with this strange problem I'd be very gratefull.


Happy Chinese New Year!!


Timekeeper

[s7p9a2m4]

fixmbr or fdisk mbr commands will do it for you.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/h...ons_fixmbr.asp

[timekeeper]

thanks for your reply. unfortunately that does not seem to solve my problem. After thinking about it, I think I'll just transfer all my files to a spare HD then format the two other hard disks and start clean over. If I format both disks after transfering the data, how do I wipe the MBR to start over clean?

[chance]

if you can back up what you want to keep, find a hard drive diagnostic disk that allows you to do a low level packet write, it will erase your disk back to raw state like new drives, mbr and all partitions will be erased. then just set it back up.

[timekeeper]

thanks for your replies. I'll try some utilities and see if they work.

P.S: What sort of diagnosis disk?