In a short explanation, won't pc won't boot up anymore

Last night i installed XP Pro in VM Ware and forgot to take the cd out, so when i booted my pc up, it took me into the WinXP install.

So now if i don't have the cd in, i get an error "No Boot pasrtion found" -- or something like that

When i go in the WinXP Recovery console, i can do bootcfg /scan and that tell me i have a windows installation on"D:\WINDOWS". I did a bootcfg /add with that installation but still no luck.

So now i'm screwed, big time...

I can't reinstall windows, i have to much stuff i would lose, so any other ideas or alternatives are immensly appreciated.

How far do you get on booting? If you can boot into a DOS prompt, from there, just uninstall VMWare (you can't uninstall/install in safe mode). If not, get into your XP disc on boot-up and remove all partitions not related to Windows. VMWare *should* recognize that there aren't any other OS's to boot any longer, and you should be able to boot XP again.

Read this article first.  Diskpart is an ugly beast and it will really help if you have some idea about what you are doing with it.

Then get back into recovery console, type "diskpart", and check that your system volume is set active.  You will be doing something along the lines of this:

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DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status      Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  ----------  -------  -------  ---  ---
* Disk 0    Online       186 GB      0 B   *
  Disk 1    Online        34 GB      0 B

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DISKPART> select disk 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Primary             34 GB    32 KB

DISKPART> select partition 1

Partition 1 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> detail partition

Partition 1
Type  : 07
Hidden: No
Active: Yes

  Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
  ----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------
* Volume 4     C   BOOT         NTFS   Partition     34 GB  Healthy    System

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alrigth, so itried all this and a couple of things on google and nothing seemed to work

Also when i did the DISKPART, i notice that one of my hdd was "unpartitioned" yet i know it contained two of them and i had data in them.

So i'm just gonna start my system anew (would probably be good since god knows how long i've had it running never cleaning it) and i'll just use some dat retrival software to go get what's on my "unpartitionned" drive.

Thanks anyways for the help you guys

What you may need or want to try is:

1) Taking the CD Out
2) Go into your BIOS and change the boot sequence to boot from C

Tried typing "fixmbr" in the Recovery Console?

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Originally posted by JDawg_0789
If you can boot into a DOS prompt,

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Originally posted by YourNeibour
What you may need or want to try is

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Originally posted by ShawnZ

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Originally posted by JDawg_0789
If you can boot into a DOS prompt,

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..because its not like they removed dos in windows xp or anything..

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Gee, for a computer nerd I was sure you'd know that you can still boot into DOS from the disc. Apparently I was wrong.

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