I decided to install Ubuntu linux on my second drive, and followed some well-tested instructions, by review of comments, on how to go about this. I'm not sure what went wrong (admittedly, it was most likely something I did), whenever I chose Vista from the Grub menu, the machine just rebooted, and started Grub again. I booted from the Vista DVD and whacked the Ubuntu partition. This made it worse.
I then scanned the DVD and HDD for anything with FDISK, BOOT, MBR in the names, and ended up finding an app called BOOTREC
After a few trials and errors (and deciphering cryptic messages), these are the steps to restore your PC's boot sector to start Vista again.
- Boot using the Vista DVD
- Choose the language, and then repair option on the next screen
- Open the command prompt from the last option on the screen
- In the command prompt:
- C:
- CD C:\BOOT
- ATTRIB -r -a -s -h
- REN BCD BCD.OLD
- BOOTREC /rebuildbcd
- BOOTREC /fixboot
- BOOTREC /fixmbr