Having fun with BootMagic in my dad's mbr

[Husar]

Well, my dad and I tried to create some dual boot goodness which worked quite fine at first, until we installed PowerQuest BootMagic.

Well, BootMagic showed us four bootable operating systems, we deleted all four and added the two real ones to the list, then restarted.
Well, apart from a minor issue(we now had 2 bootmanagers:juggle2: ) we noticed that the three particions we deleted from the bootmenu list were now hidden, among them was the one where BootMagic was installed, denyin us access to the program in order to stop the madness. it would also hide them again all the time after trying to unhide them so my dad deleted the partition where it was installed, giving us an error message at the boot process. Well, we could unhide the partitions again but now we always need to hit a key to get rid of that error message while booting since BootMagic is still in the mbr(master boot record thing).
Well, we are now searching for a way to get it out of there without reinstalling windows or messing up the partitions on the drive.

Installing BootMagic again won't work because it cannot find the old installation folder.
Two programs to reset the mbr either wanted us to pay before doing anything(some program from Paragon) or just showed some graphical errors making everything unreadable(Super FDisk).
Fdisk doesn't come with Win XP afaik so we cannot put that onto a bootable DOS disk(also FDisk has problems with drives over 64GB I read, my dad has a 160GB drive).

So the wuestion is, does anyone know a program, utility or downloadable bootdisk with a new version of FDisk that will finally allow us to get rid of that error message and reset the mbr?:help:

edit: well, there is also fixmbr in the recovery console but it gives a severe warning and my dad is not very interested in data loss, how safe is that?

[caravel]

You need to go to the recovery console and enter fixmbr. When you reboot you may need to set up your boot.ini again in order to be able to boot to other OS's though this is usually not the case. If that fails you can try booting back to the recovery console and entering fixboot. That may replace boot.ini which means you will have to set up that file again (no big deal if you know what you're doing). If you had any non M$ OS installed you'll need to reinstall the bootloader for that afterwards.

[R'as al Ghul]

Fdisk doesn't come with Win XP afaik

You can use that from the recovery console, don't you? I could swear it's there.

[caravel]

Diskpart (http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/diskpart.mspx?mfr=true) is the NT/2K/XP equivalent of DOS/Win9x's Fdisk. The knowledgebase article should be read carefully before using it.