A little help here, removed Mandriva Linux from my system, went fine, am running two hard drives, Linux installed on the second, Windows on the first. Problem started after I tried to restore the Master Boot tecord onto the first hard drive to remove an option to load the Linux. Ran fixboot and fixmbr commands from the Windows XP CD recovery console. End result the drive now won't boot up, if installed on another computer as a slave it can't be read, says drive needs to be formatted, so I'm open to ideas to restore the boot sector or to be able to pull the documents and photos from the hard drive before I wipe it clean and reinstall everything again.
run a chkdsk c: /f on that hard drive. or a scandisk with the box to fix errors checked. Whenever the hard drive isn't recognize (or shows up as raw) it's a sign of file corruption. Even if the MBR is damaged, all the data is still recoverable. If chkdsk/scandisk doesn't work, you can try the free "testdisk" it has more repair tools. Also testdisk has an addon called "photorec" that can recover most data from an unreadable hard drive.
