I have been using Norton Ghost (SystemWorks 2003) as a safety measure, to clone successfully my master Win-98se fat-32 hdd (fitted in a removable rack) into a slave drive, both in the same primary Ide. When I upgraded to XP with Ntfs, the clone slave hdd (changing the boot sequence in Bios) could be booted normally if the master was present but refused to do it alone (master disk removed from the rack). Fiddling with jumpers and changing positions didn't help. The news about this problem gave me a wide number of clues. One would expect the way to repair this nuisance was to use the recovery console included in Win-XP cd. Unfortunately FIXMBR followed by FIXBOOT C: made no difference. Before trying any of the many helpful ideas offered, I was puzzled by a very simple suggestion made by "I'm Dan": use the old Win-98 recovery floppy (
www.bootdisk.com) and run it (with the clone hdd alone!!!) enter 'fdisk /mbr' and the job is done. As simple as that. All the credits to Dan with my special thanks.