no boot after slave crash

I have a primary master loaded with Xp Pro. I have a primary slave loaded with simply mepis. I have secondaries with cd drives, and also a floppy drive. When I loaded mepis, I think I told the installer to tell the mbr to go to the grub menu to select which OS should be loaded. I didn't know how to set the mbr to tell it which os to load, and linux offered this option. The problem now is that the primary slave is not working at all, and the mbr is still looking for a grub, which isn't available. My winxp cd won't allow a boot, so I don't know at this point how to get fix the mbr to tell it to boot to windows instead of pointing to the grub.

I really, really, really don't want to have to partition this drive! Any suggestions?

 

I never get that far. During the POST, it checks the NVRam, and then I got a message about a hdd failure. Since removing it from the cable, now I get a request for a boot device.

 

I know the cables were set correctly; it was something that I had to work out to make the installation of linux work, because I installed the slave myself, and tried to use cableselect on the slave only to discover that the master was set to master. And both drives were working Friday morning, and at some point Saturday.

I have checked the settings in BIOS; I haven't looked at mbrvirus check, and running fdiskmbr may indeed be something I end up having to do--assuming I can ever get that far.

Not stupid questions at all--if I hadnt done those things, I'd kick myself if one of them worked!

 

bios recognizes the drive but recognizes it as failed. when I disabled it, it recognized it as there but disabled. when I disconnected it, it didn't recognize it.

 

closing teh book on the failed slave driver; going scsi when I replace it. new problem on mbr posted in winXP region.