Master Boot Record

Has anyone tried this?

History:

I have two Maxtor 160 G hard drives.

C: drive is 2 Gig with XP installed.
D: 160 Gig Maxtor installed with MaxBlast using their DDO. Everything is perfect until:

Either operator error (likely) or a virus destroyed what I think is the MBR on D: when I used a disk manager to format a USB drive. After the system won't boot with the D: drive attached. An image of C: drive onto a third Maxtor boots fine, which is what I'm using now, but I would like to recover some files off of the old D: drive.

Question:

Could a person install the other 160 GIG Maxtor with the original C: drive, same partitions/parameters etc. This should make MBR the same as the first installation. Use MaxBlast to restore the MBR to the first (defective) drive. From my understanding the MBR stores information where the extended and logical drives are. The FAT of the drive should be at the beginning of the logical drive.

I asked the maxtor technician and he thought this might work but could not say for sure. He also suggested installing the D: drive into another computer which wouldn't need DDO to run. My thoughts on this is that it would not work since the MBR is probably defective and hence the comuter will not know where to find the logical drive.

2 question:

Anyone have links to sources for information on MBR and FAT.

Thanks