Repairing a Blown-Out NT Boot Sector

The multi-OS management world is riddled with danger. An OS or disk-management utility that overwrites the Windows NT-created boot sector on the first hard disk's primary partition is a common problem. As a result, you might have no choice but to boot into one OS (e.g., when you install the original version of Windows 95 or an early Win95 OEM Service Release--OSR--2 version on an NT system), or the system might fail to boot. In either case, you lose access to NT's boot loader. To restore access to the boot loader, use your NT Setup Disks (you can recreate these disks by booting an NT installation on another machine and running winnt.exe or winnt32.exe and the /ox command-line switch) to boot the system and run NT Setup. During setup, select the Recovery option (use your Emergency Repair Disk--ERD), select only the option to inspect the boot sector, and let NT repair the boot sector. After this process finishes, you've restored your original NT boot sector and the boot loader will reappear at startup.