I have been working on a computer that was badly infected with several rootkits. After removing them it would not boot. I tried WinXP recovery console (chkdsk /r and fixboot) and that didn't work. After extracting the user data from the disk, I tried doing a fresh install of WinXP, which resulted in an unwanted dual boot situation.
I thought my best bet would be to pull the hard drive, reformat it using another computer, and start completely afresh with an WinXP install.
The drive has been completely reformatted and now has two NTFS partitions - a small one of 31 MB at the start of the drive and another that eats up the remainder of the 40GB drive.
Now, however, when I attempt to boot the system I am getting a BIOS error saying 'Primary drive 0 not found - press F1 to retry or F2 to enter setup utility'. I have checked that the boot sequence is supposed to go to the CD drive first, and I thought it would continue to do this as it always had, but it now refuses.
I should note that the drive appears to be perfectly healthy. I can hook it up to my other computers using a USB-to-IDE bridge cable and it shows up and acts perfectly normally. In fact, this was how I went about reformatting the drive, using the USB-to-IDE bridge. When I use the WinXP Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management under the control panel this drive gets a full "healthy" on each partition.
I know I must have done something utterly bone-headed, and I'm hoping that it can be remedied.
I am sorry if I picked the wrong forum in which to post this question, but it could fall into any of several categories.
Thank you in advance for any assistance you can offer.
Brian