I have a dual boot machine, each with Windows XP. 2 HDDs, one mine and one my wife’s. The drive with the boot record is mine, the C:\ drive. The other day I realized my wife’s (D: drive) didn’t have SP1 installed. So, I installed it. I failed to disable Norton anti-virus when I did this and I think this is what cause my problem. But now when I boot the PC and the menu comes up, if I choose my wife’s drive it will ACT like it’s going to load, then just reboot and come back up to the boot menu again. I can still get into mine (that contains the mbr) just fine though. Choosing the “Last Known Good blah, blah, blah…” did not help. I cannot boot into safe mode on that driver either, not even in DOS mode.
I popped in the XP installation CD to bring up the recovery console thinking there would be a way to uninstall SP1 but there is not. I noted there are two commands though, FIXBOOT and FIXMBR. I tried FIXBOOT and this did not help. When I typed FIXMBR I got a caution stating the machine doesn’t have a common boot record or is invalid and proceeding may make ALL drives inaccessible. So I chose not to do that for now. I have had to reformat this thing 3 times in the last year, so I would REALLY like to find a way to gain access to this drive again so I can put SP1 on there properly. Any ideas?