Unable to fix MBR

[trenkoff]

Hi guys,
A while ago I have installed Suse 10.1 onto a separate partiton on my hard drive.The other partition has WinXP.After the install i found out I can't boot into WinXP , it just stops at the progress bars. That wasn't a big problem for me at the time, because i had all I needed in Suse. But now I am in desperate need in Windows, because of a number of software i need for my job that only works in windows. So first I tried to fix the MBR, through the XP cd , but it gives a black screen after "Press any key to boot from cd" and reboots automatically after about a minute. I tried to do the same with a boot floppy
(used XP boot floppy and Win98 floppy) but it stops loading after "MS DOS something something". So the next thing I did is connect the hard drive to another XP machine and it found the hard drive , but did't display any partitions in "My computer". Partition Magic found the hard drive and I tried to format the HD through it , but it gives out a "batch" error. I have no idea of what else to do....Suse works great, but it's not enough. I don't have any precious data on the HD , so i just need to format it..

[smolloy]

Sounds like something might have gone wrong with your XP drive.

Have you tried formatting it with QtParted in SUSE? This is a partition magic clone, so should look very familiar to you.

[trenkoff]

Thank you smolloy for replying.
I haven't tried QtParted, but I found a solution.
I connected the hard drive to another machine ,so that it would be the only hdd connected to it.I booted up the XP boot cd and it worked! So with it;s help I deleted all the partitions, left only one and formated it to NTFS. Next I connected it up to my machine and everything worked, right now I'm installing xp on it.