MBR Problem

I am so confused as to what has happened to my computer (in sig). Heres my situation.

I have two 320GB SATA harddrives, on is a seagate and the other hitachi. They are both about 1 year old.

I had them partitioned in this manner:

Seagate:
Partition 1:Windows (system) Windows Vista
Partition 2ocuments
Partition 3:Web Disk

Hitatchi:
Partition 1ownloads
Partition 2:Converted
Partition 3:Storage

I took my Converted partition and deleted it because I only use it for storing movies that I converted into DVD (audio_ts / video_ts) I then created two partitions from this one partition so that I could install Kubuntu. I installed Kubuntu and every thing was going good. I actually ended up not liking it and deleted it.

This is when the problem started. My Windows Vista started giving me problems. Actually, it was using Grub as the bootloader and this was kind of annoying me. So I went into "Startup and Recovery" in the "My Computer" properties and adjusted the system startup and default operating system. I could not boot into vista anymore. I tried installing XP and it seemed nothing would work. I even loaded "Seatools", proprietary software for seagate harddrives and ran tests and everything passed. I then deleted the first one minute of the track to fix the MBR. I used XP to fix the mbr (fix mbr command after booting from disc) Well this didn't work.

I then removed the Hitachi drive from my system so that none of the previous grub loader would affect my windows installation. This allowed me to install XP and not vista. I am still unable to install vista. I have several installation discs, all with integrated updates. I have the discs for June, July and August, and neither one of them will let me install vista. The install either hangs, or goes really slow. I don't understand how this is happening. The closest I got was to the screen where you enter your username/password. After I did all that, the system hung.

On top of all this, somehow I lost my Documents/Webdisk partition on the seagate drive. And I lost my Downloads/Converted partitions on my Hitachi drive. At least converted was empty at the time because I had transferred my movies to dvd's and my documents partition gets backed up once a week. I did lose my Webdisk partition which contained thousands of templates/files that I use for web editing, not to mention graphics that I had been working on. Don't ask why I don't back that stuff up, I guess because the data is too large and I haven't found any type of back up software reliable enough to back up that type of sensative data. Don't get me wrong I have tried acronis backup / norton ghost and it seems that everytime I try to restore theres an error.

Two questions. What can I do now to get my computer to install Vista? What should I do? Should I wipe the entire drive and then start over? Is there a way to fix the MBR on the Hitachi (since thats where Kubuntu/Grub was loaded)?

Can you recommend a free backup utility that allows me to image a drive so that I can burn onto DVD R/W?

Thanks for reading.

Chris

GH0, thank you very much for those informative links, this is exactly what I have been searching for. Believe me, I did extensive research on this topic before I posted to the forum. All the sites that I found wanted me to download software to fix these problems. The one site that I found with the command lines, the commands ended up not working. This site gives multiple commands for the Vista Fix MBR command lines. Thanks again, I will let you know how it turns out very shortly.

+1 REP added!