Gregory Seidman wrote:
I believe I'd try to boot into Safe Mode; just after selecting Windows from the lilo prompt, press F8 (about once every second or two); this should bring up a menu allowing you to choose Safe Mode. In this mode, you can right-click on "My Computer", select "Mangle", er, "Manage", and go into something like "Disks", and perhaps tell Windows to ignore the hdb drive.By installing Sarge I have somehow rendered my friend's Windows system unbootable. The original configuration was two 200GB drives, hda and hdb. Windows XP was on hda and the other drive was apparently empty. I repartitioned hdb as part of the Sarge install, removing the unused NTFS partition and replacing it with root (ext3), swap, home (ext3), and vfat partitions. I had the installer use LILO, and when it rebooted into base-config everything appeared to be fine. I then altered the /etc/lilo.conf to make sure that it was installing on /dev/hda but using /dev/hdb1 as root. It seemed happy with this and installed on the MBR of /dev/hda without difficulty. After installing and configuring lots of packages, I decided to reboot to Windows and leave it at that for the time being. Windows would boot part of the way, then complain about a missing AUTOCHK or something and immediately reboot. So I tried booting to Linux, and it couldn't find the root partition. I managed to boot by explicitly giving root=/dev/hdb1 on the LILO prompt, but there does not seem to be any way to get Windows to boot.
If this doesn't work, I'd crack the case and physically disconnect the data cable from the hdb drive, then see if Windows boots up.
If neither of these works, you may be looking at a reinstall of Windows (which is always nasty, but more so with XP since it creates new "Docs.&Setting" and etc -- Windows is so limited in so many ways), but I'd exhaust all other reasonable possibilities first.
You probably think that installing Debian is what crashed Windows; that might indeed be the case (although it shouldn't since you didn't touch anything but the MBR on the Windows disk, unless Windows was using hdb in some manner unbeknownst to you), but it's just as likely that Windows decided to go belly-up coincidentally at this same time, due to a new Windows Update that just got installed, or the latest spyware kicking into high gear, or any number of things.
-- Kent