repair a found boot sector?

[XP_RObin]

Hi, I'm a newbie, but this forum has been so helpful in the past(i never had a unique problem before), that I'm hoping someone out there can help me.

I just got a new p4 2.2 GHz Dell with XP Pro and am *trying* to get my new Maxtor 80GHz HD to boot and run on its own, without the HD that came all set-up with it. Note that I have a 20G NTFS partition as boot, and (2) 60G partitions as fat32.
I guess since I added it before removing the Western Dig HD that came with it, my system thinks itself to be a multiboot(and i don't care)

I keep running into problems and last Thursday thought I had worked through them all with help from reading this forum(missing hal.dll, ntldr missing, etc). So in summary, the computer worked fine for 3 days and the ability to boot died without changing a thing yesterday.(missing hal.dll and then when do a bootcfg /rebuild, there are no boot something--was it sectors? devices? something like that.

After running my 4th chkdsk /p, it finally found something-- i don't know what-- and so I ran fixmbr, fixboot and bootcfg /rebuild added it to the boot.ini file. So, at this point I'm happily choosing
to boot this option and I'm told:
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \found.000\dir000.chk\system32\config\system
and that I can atttempt to repair it using the orig setup CD rom.

Ok. great---i can get into recovery mode, but what is my command????


Thanks for any words of wisdom!
Robin

p.s. don't know if it matters: If i add the western dig HD as a slave and boot off that, all my files on the Maxtor are available---nothing seems to be missing .

p.p.s.is it true that if master and slave hard drives are on the same IDE cable and are different speeds, they run at the same slower speed? (that's whay i thought to not use my slower 40G HD)

[shawshank62]

^^bump^^

[Zenara25]

Don't use the recovery console. Skip that and choose to install Windows. At the next screen it allows you to repair Windows. Press 'R' I believe. (At least that's how it works for my XP Home)

It repairs itself and looks just like a normal install but keeps all your programs intact. The only 2 things you have to do is reinstall any updated drivers and do windows update all over again.

[meese]

"Ok. great---i can get into recovery mode, but what is my command????"

What do you mean by this?

[win2kuser]

I would agree with Zenara25, forget the console or last known good configuration etc.

Stick your disk in the drive, reboot, install and select Repair when prompted. This will re-install all system files but will leave your programs instact.

As stated by Zenara25, you WILL need to re-install all drivers - video, mobo chipset etc.

hth...