Unable to recover from failed boot manager install

Started by liamlapwing, January 23, 2010, 14:41:26 PM

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liamlapwing

Hi,

I seem to have rendered my windows installations unusable after a failed install of PloP. I hope some may be able to help me...

On a new laptop hd I installed 3 primary partitions, and on two I installed identical copies of windows xp. To enable easy selection of which to boot at startup I tried to install PLoP boot manager.

First I tried installing it onto CD and this seemed to work fine - at startup I was presented with the option of which partition to boot from as expected, and selecting either worked.

Next I installed to hd from a cd. After installing I restarted and while the boot manager ran from the hd, this time it only presented one partition for booting. I tried to edit the settings but did not succeed in booting from any partition.

I tried to uninstall (I'm aware it's not a full uninstall as I chose to install from CD). Now when I start my computer it says there is no operating system. I get the same thing when I use the BootManager on CD. Even worse, when I try to repair using my original windows CD it is unable to launch windows and blue screens! So now I can't use either windows installation and I can't even reinstall or repair!

Incidentally the windows cd works fine with a different hd installed. Is there any way I could 'reset' the boot info on my new drive from the old one (I can connect it via usb). Or does anyone have any ideas how I can get out of this nightmare situation?

Apologies for the lengthy post but as you can imagine I'm in a bit of a panic about this!

thanks,

Liam

Elmar


Elmar