Lost the ability to boot to either OS in dual-boot XP system

[Jeemy]

I really hope there's a simple solution to this - I'm on brown alert here!

My PC has 2 hard drives, a 120Gb IDE one and a 20Gb SCSI. The IDE drive contains 2 OS partitions, one for running my studio, and the other for doing everything else, plus 2 storage partitions. The SCSI one was just for recording audio, but I'd split it into two partitions for no good reason.

Well yesterday I decided I wanted to move the SCSI drive to one partition as we ran out of recording space. I deleted the extended partition, but couldn't delete the primary one, as Windows XP told me it was a system partition (not a boot one, that was the OS partition). I looked on it, couldn't see any system files, hidden or otherwise, so I booted into SCSI-Select and low-level formatted it.

Well now when you switch on the PC all you get is "please insert boot device". There was possibly some little pointer hidden on the SCSI drive that showed the machine where the OS's were?

Can anybody help? I backed up the contents of the drive, but I don't know what I'm looking for, and if I had it, I wouldn't know how to copy it onto a SCSI drive without being in Windows.

Hope you can help me,

Thanks,

Jamie

 

[infernon]

Not completely sure how much help this will give you...
I believe that you have to modify your boot.ini file to point the boot loader towards the correct partition. I don't remember the exact settings that you'll want to use, but you should be able to find more information on M$'s site by querying for 'boot.ini' or something like that. You should be able to do this with the recovery console (boot from the XP disc and select the appropriate option).
Hope this helps! Good luck!