RE #15
No disrespect taken. It's just differences in methodology. I personally think that advising a user to remove hardware such as a disk and cable it up in another system is wise for many different reasons: possibility of damage to components, there are many different disk interfaces on the market, we don't know what type the user has, or what type they have access to and if these are even compatible, then, we have to determine if they even know how to R/R a disk and set CMOS settings correctly. Then you start getting into other variables that could really screw things up. Lastly, most users who would know how to do what you outlined would probably have already done it or fixed the problem via other methods, and wouldn't be asking for help on a discount cigar forum. (sorry Tony)
Always go with the easiest and least invasive method first - easy method is a repair via the OS disk. Hard is the rip **** apart, I don't know about you, but I really don't like talking people through computer hardware disassembly and reassembly over the phone. If the easy way doesn't work, you can always tear crap apart.
As to address the MBR misinformation in your post - fixing an MBR is actually not that hard at all. All that the MBR contains is a partition table (the repair utility can figure out where your partitions are and rewrite this), a micro boot kernel (this is copied from the install disc) and possibly some boot parameters (these are rarely anything custom on MS os's). The repair utility is automated, and it's very rare that the repair can't fix it. If it can't fix it, you probably have bigger problems to worry about.
*shrug* Anyway, no worries, sorry to be so long winded.
