How to fix Master boot record damaged by Vista

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someone

I attempted to install Vista on a second hard drive which had a
primary partition and an extended partition. Both were formatted HPFS
by Partition Magic.
The first time Vista did not see the primary partition on the second
drive even though I had unplugged the first drive where my XP system
is on.
Restarting the install I had Vista delete the partition and recreate
it. That went well albeit very slowly and Vista installed untill it
got to the part where it sets up the user information, desktop picture
etc and ends with a screen saying now you are ready to start windows.
Clicking on start nothing happens.
After a few tries I gave up and plugged my first drive back in
rebooted to XP but, when I started partition magic to redo the primary
partition, on the second hd, I get a message from PM that the drive
geometry is wrong and I should delete and recreate the partition.
Attempting to do so resulted in PM abending with invalid parameter and
nothing being done.
I can still see the extended partition in WinXp but the primary is
gone.

So how do I fix the mbr so I can get the primary partition back?
 
I have a question that may or may not help you, but may help others: Did you
also use a third-party boot manager, such as BootMagic or VistaBootPro? I
ask because it was always my assumption that this would either prevent
corruption of or rebuild automatically (not sure) the MBR.
 
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