Hi, Tony!

Sorry to hear about your HDD trouble. Well, if so many help here didn't work for you then my little idea won't help you anyway, I'm afraid.

If the MBR is defect then you'll have to recover it with fdisk /mbr in DOS mode (like Walt told you). It could work for you to re-install Windows again because the Windows installer will try to repair your resident Windows without formatting the HDD or overwriting any datas.

You've mentioned a very good way - installing a new HDD with Windows and then connect your defect drive as a second drive. If the partition information is still there then it should be possible to read and copy your whole datas. Don't get panic as long as it's nothing lost!

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Greetings from Frankfurt (Germany),
Sheriff ;-)