Ok here is my problem

HD 1 - 160GB split into two partitions
(a)first 7GB
(b)second 150GB
HD 2 - 70GB one partition

Partition (a) has WinXP Pro
Partition (b) has misc files, music and such

Partition (b) kept coming up with multiple problems, file on it would become corrupt, information would go missing

Partition (a) had no seeable problems

So I moved everything from Partition (b) to the second HD to avoid losing any more files due to corruption, my plan was to then due a format of Partition (b) and let chkdsk fix any problems that it found.

Everything going well so far

Went to format P(b) and would not format so I looked around and discovered that P(b) was the active partition for some reason, unhid all the files on P(b) and there was the boot.ini, ntloader and such, checked P(a) and it also had the system files, so I changed P(a) to the active partition using Partition Magic, and figured all good, rebooted and recieved :

"A Disk Read Error Occurred Press Ctrl+Alt+Del"

Checked my MBR which stated the following :

Pos 0 P(a) Active
Pos 1 P(b) Not Active

A quick fix for me to still be able to use the computer, is to set P(b) as the active partition and everything works fine, but I want to get rid of P(b), but seeing as without P(b) my system will not boot, this is not a possibility.

I have followed the steps that I found after googling my problem, IE : fixmbr, fixboot and so fourth but nothing seems to make P(a) bootable.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

I think that I stated all relevant information but if I missed anything just ask

you want help then you need to donate to ugn [censored] :p

Lol, you know, I'm not entirely sure short of repartitioning and reformatting... I'll give it some thought, i'm doin ga bunch of thingscurrently.

Well I ended up just blowing away the whole HD and starting from scratch

Would have been my sugguestion ... I'm sure Sin or Sum would have sugguested cfdisk or fdisk from a livedistro ...

In my case, I would start from the scratch since I have no interest in hardware hacking and system administration. But if you are interested, and willing to spend some money for another HD I suppose you should get to the bottom of it. Nothing great comes without great pain. Make every possible change to your system untill you come up with a sollution. If you still could not get to it, I suggest you should go to yahoo answers service by registering for a free id. There you will surely get an answer. Telling this with some personal experience.

The first thing I would have done is run a complete Virus scan on that Partition, then a complete system scan.

But that problem I've never encountered