Windows & DOS: Issues & Discussions

fdisk /mbr should never be used with a NT OS's unless you want to eliminate the NT boot sector and replace it with the DOS boot sector, so you can reload DOS/Win9x OS. Difference being - FDISK /MBR sets a system up to boot DOS, thus the boot sector tell the machine to look for a file call IO.SYS to continue booting the OS. NT OS's on the other hand have utilities (depends on which version of NT - 2k/XP use the "recovery console" - I'm unsure about NT 4.0) to replace the boot sector with the NT boot info to look for the files NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, and BOOT.INI.

fdisk /mbr would have not been too difficult to recovery from, had you booted with the WinXP CD and went into the "recovery console" and used the FIXMBR command, or choose to "Repair" and existing WinXP installation and had it inspect/repair the bootfiles and boot sector, had you not been using EZBIOS on the Maxtor drive. My suggestion, try running without the manufacturer's software first to see if you have the full disk capacity. When you reloaded EZBIOS, you in effect destroyed the partition table that held the information where each partition begins and ends on a physical drive.