restore vista MBR

I tried dual booting xp and vista on a laptop and the xp install failed saying it had a conflict with the I/O devices, then the MB?R went out and i need help getting the data back or restoring have not formatted primary HDD that hhas vista. I tried putting xp on seperate HDD.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321626/en-us (esp. methods 2 & 3)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927820/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919529/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930132/en-us

Yeah, it's a lot to look at, but I'm sure you'll find something helpful. Be careful when messing with the MBR and/or the MPT as major damage can be done, rendering the drive almost useless. Personally, the first thing I'd do before messing with the boot record or partition table would be to use a 'live' boot CD like the UBCD4Win or the Active@BootCD or even a Knoppix CD to boot up the system and take a look at the data on the drive, and back it up. The Active@BootCD loads in to memory so after it loads, you can remove it and burn your data to CD/DVD, but I'm not 100% sure if the free demo has this full functionality. A single personal license is about $80US and may be worth it to you. The UBCD4Win is 100% free, but you must boot up with an external USB drive plugged in for data backup, or have a 2nd CD/DVD burner available. I haven't used Knoppix lately, but about 18months ago, it worked the same way and could not be removed from the drive. If you have an external drive, or can borrow one from a friend, this would be the best way to save your data before messing with the MBR. A how-to guide for building the UBCD4Win can be found at this link.
Good luck! Keep us posted!

[dlb]