So yes, fixed the MBR on my hard drive. I used the disk utility that came with the drive when we bought it 3 years ago—one victory for being a packrat! 😉 I ended up having to do a low-level format that took all night. That kept Sam’s PC down because I had to do it from a bootable machine.
My machine still refuses to boot from anything BUT a hard drive. Yes, I’ve set things up properly in the BIOS. It’s just stupid. I guess that’s one of the reasons this thing was thrown out as trash by Sam’s former employer, huh? So next comes putting it back on Sam’s PC, unhooking his hard drive, and making the hard drive bootable. I have boot disks for WinME, but they give me the incredibly un-helpful message that “Windows no longer supports /s” when I try format /s, and a similar message when I try to use the sys command. Grrr.
I appreciate the pointers from the helpful folks who’ve posted 🙂
