I have built a new computer and am running Windows XP and NTFS. This
computer has a new hard drive on the IDE primary, set as master, also
on this primary is a slave drive, mounted in a removeable caddy. At
the time of installing XP the new drive was empty, mounted in the
caddy was a drive from my old computer, ready to transfer applications
and data to the new rig. This old drive had a 450Mb partition at its
front end (previously used as a home for my paging files as I put
these on a separate drive to the O.S.) When XP installed, it put the
MBR in this first partition on the slave drive and the balance of the
installation went in the first partition created on the new hard drive
(master). Supidly, I did not realise what had happened until well into
the task of loading the various applications, principally because I
don't install these to C drive but to a separate drive for convenience
of grouping - and XP called this little partition C.

I now want to use the caddy for its intended purpose, namely to house
a drive to contain my back-ups, something I do with swappable caddies
- but of course I can't take the present drive away because that
removes the MBR. So what I need to do is either move the present MBR
to the new drive or create a new MBR on that drive and kill the
present one.

My anticipated strategy would be to create a new small partition at
the front of the new drive, using Partition Magic version 7, copy the
existing MBR to this, hide the existing partition (again with
Partition Magic) and attempt to boot up. If it all works OK, then
remove the original MBR and wipe it out. But can anyone advise me if
this is OK? or of a better strategy? - I've checked the Microsoft
Knowledge Base and found nothing of help, sent enquiries to Help
departments of computer magazines (no replies)

Read through this (http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/~tkuurstra/kitmanual.pdf),
it has some rather indepth info on MBRs and how to fix them and back
them up.

Possible solution :
1. get back a windows 98 boot floppy disk 
2. boot on this disk, with the old HDD removed
3. run 'fdisk /mbr'

If you don't have any win98 floppy disk around, images of such disk
can be found on internet (http://www.bootdisk.com/, for example).

To yeff:- Thanks for the comment, I downloaded the information, but it
does not really address the question of moving the MBR - however,
there is a mine of other stuff there which may well come in handy on
some other occasion.

To dago :- I have a Win98 boot disk, but hesitate to follow your
recommendation as Win XP does not support Fdisk any more - the nearest
thing is Diskpart, which does not create an MBR> Are you saying I can
create a new MBR for my NTFS volumes with a Win 98 boot disk in DOS?

batrachian

What happens when you try to boot from the new master disk?