ASUS PRO31JC Notebook problem

I have reformatted lappy using vista image on hidden partition and when it has reinstalled and rebooted its just shows 'missing operating system'

I have checked with 'gparted' and only have a 106gb ntfs partition with vista on it and the 4.8gb fat 32 hidden partition with the vista recovery image on that

Prior to this problem I would reinstall from hidden partition and once installed and rebooted i would get the Asus loading screen and then the machine would restart again the asus loading would show again and machine would restart again and this would just keep going over and over

I must confess, i have been playing around with linux and osx on this machine and doing stuff with the partitions, so yes, I am to blame, but does anyone know what I need to do so I can reimage from the recovery partition and get vista back on and working

The reimage works fine and vista is reinstalled ok - its just once its reinstalled and machine reboots it doesn't continue into vista i get the 'missing operating system' error or before that it was doing the restart looping

Its like my MBR is stuffed - how do i fix it

I have confirmed with 'gparted' again and there still only 2 partitions on the drive

fat32 4.88gb 3.81gb used 1.08gb unused hidden, lba
ntfs Vista OS 106.91gb 7.71gb used 99.19gb unused boot

Hope someone can help

Thanks

 

you could fix the MBR in a few ways. I know of the following:
fdisk /mbr from a FreeDOS bootable CD.
fixmbr from a WinXP recovery console boot.