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Ok I have a HP dv9210us and an external western digital 160GB hard drive. I was installing linux onto the drive and I some how mistakenly put the lilo boot loader onto sda (my internal) instead of sdb (my external). So now when I boot up to windows I need to have my external pluged in just to boot to windows on my internal. Anyway to make it simple how do I go about fixing my MBR on the drive. No I dont have any CDs. HP decided as many other OEMs to not ship CDs anymore so all I have is a partition on my HD that they put there.

Thank you all for the help and keep up the great work.

Of concern include drive letters, boot loader capability, system restore etc. Any answers deeply appreciated... you'd save me the trouble of research plus trial and error.

I had windows xp in one partition of my hdd and I decided to install vista in another partition of the same drive.Vista didn't gave me a 2nd option after installing them and I run EasyBCD to inform Windows Boot Manager that there is an xp operating system in drive d: (vista are in drive c:).
Indeed I was presented with a second boot option but that 2nd option doesnt work.I get the message :

Windows Boot Manager

Windows Failed to start

A recent hardware or software change might be the cause

...blah blah blah

I'll post here the EasyBCD 'View Settings' Display Mode (detailed) :

Hi,

Sorry for this longish post, I just want to explain things as clearly as possible.

I am having problems dual booting XP and Vista. XP boots up as default which is what I want for the time being but I cannot boot to Vista. I do not get the boot loader during start-up so I cannot choose. The only way I can boot to Vista is to have the Vista DVD in the dvd drive at start-up, which loads the Vista boot loader allowing me to choose what OS I want to boot from.

I have 2 HDD’s:

1. My main drive is 250G. This has 2 partitions (200G for XP Pro 64bit and the rest for Vista Business 32bit)