I'm assuming that "Disk error" is coming from Grub, since I don't remember
seeing that from Windows' boot loader. I guess it could be your motherboard.
Knowing which would be a big help.

I've done what you did before, and I was able to fix it with a combination
of fixboot and fixmbr (despite its name, it seems to do partition boot
records as well in Rescue mode. fdisk /mbr probably couldn't hurt either.
You said you reinstalled Windows? Wow. Drastic. That *should* have fixed
*everything* :-p

Since it doesn't seem to have, either I'm missing something, I misunderstood
what you said, or you broke something completely different.

In any rate, if you're sure that the problem is that the Windows partition
boot record is clobbered, you can make a backup pretty easily. I was going
to write out the commands to do all this stuff but then I was googling and I
found this page, http://astron.berkeley.edu/~jhall/grub_install_hda1.html ,
which, heh, seems pretty well targeted to you :-p
The only problem is that this is designed to restore a 9x windows, not XP.
XP doesn't have any equivalent command to sys, I don't think, so you'll need
to copy a good bootsector, like this:
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=boot.bin bs=512 count=1
then get it to your Linux install on the broken machine, and do:
dd if=boot.bin of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1
I've never personally done this myself, but there ought not to be any
important information in that area anyway (now that you've clobbered it) but
you still might want make a back up. Which I shouldn't need to explain.

If that doesn't do it for you, you might have broken something else.
Alternatively, if you don't have a functioning Windows machine, I think I
can muster up the 512 bytes of bandwidth to email you a good boot sector off
one of my machines. Just ask me off-list.
-Heschi


> In a moment of lessened attention, I executed 'setup (hd0,0)' in grub,
> rather than the 'setup (hd0)' that I intended to use. The problem now is
> that I can't boot XP that's installed on the (hd0,0) partition. It says
> Disk error\nPress any key to retry.
> I have tried the XP fixboot utility to rewrite the bootsector on that
> drive, but to no avail. Is there a way I can undo the changes that grub
> made to this partition?



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