I used a third-party formatting tool to allocate some space from my Vista drive for a new partition, and of course, it corrupted the MBR.
Booted from CD to try the recovery environment, no luck--it couldn't find the old volume, although all the files on C:\ were intact (I could see them from the command prompt). What I should have done was to use BCDedit and simply mount my old C:\ volume to the "unknown" entries in the BCD store. But of course I didn't do that. I instead deleted the system BCD store completely thinking that I somehow could create a new, clean store. Little did I know that we're not talking boot.ini here. BCDedit uses hex values and GUID and heck knows what else, and it's all extremely complicated.
Now the Recovery Environment is stuck in an endless loop that reboots, BSOD's and goes back into recovery with a corrupt volume diagnosis. Again, the C:\ drive is intact other than the cursed BCD store that's been deleted without any backups. I'm hoping there is a way to get my installation back. Any thoughts welcome.
Booted from CD to try the recovery environment, no luck--it couldn't find the old volume, although all the files on C:\ were intact (I could see them from the command prompt). What I should have done was to use BCDedit and simply mount my old C:\ volume to the "unknown" entries in the BCD store. But of course I didn't do that. I instead deleted the system BCD store completely thinking that I somehow could create a new, clean store. Little did I know that we're not talking boot.ini here. BCDedit uses hex values and GUID and heck knows what else, and it's all extremely complicated.
Now the Recovery Environment is stuck in an endless loop that reboots, BSOD's and goes back into recovery with a corrupt volume diagnosis. Again, the C:\ drive is intact other than the cursed BCD store that's been deleted without any backups. I'm hoping there is a way to get my installation back. Any thoughts welcome.