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#1
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After fresh XP install I get "ntldr is missing"
I "Googled" this error but what I dug up doesn't make any sense to me,
so I thought I'd ask for help here. My dad's motherboard failed after we had a series of power fluxuations in our town. I replaced it with a MSI KM4M-V motherboard. Dad had a SATA WD GB Raptor, and an old 17gb WD IDE drive. I did a clean install of Windows XP (and service pack 2) on the Raptor (w/NTFS file system). Windows XP assigned the older drive as the C: drive and the newer Raptor as D: drive. I didn't do anything to the older drive (it had a bunch of old files backed up on it). It's also NTFS. When the machine boots I get "ntldr is missing" prior to Windows XP loading and it asks me to "control alt del". When I do this 2nd boot I get a clean boot into Windows XP. Everything seems to work fine from this point on (until I turn the machine on the next time and then I get the "ntldr is missing" error again. When I "Googled" on this error it appears that this happens when someone is working with a "ghosted" drive. But I haven't ghosted anything. Everything seems to work fine once I do the 2nd boot. Any ideas as to what is messed up? Is there an easy way to fix this (without having to reinstall XP again?). Thanks in advance for any help you can give me. - David Kistner |
#2
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On Sun, 02 Jan 2005 02:00:08 GMT, David Kistner
wrote: I "Googled" this error but what I dug up doesn't make any sense to me, so I thought I'd ask for help here. My dad's motherboard failed after we had a series of power fluxuations in our town. I replaced it with a MSI KM4M-V motherboard. Dad had a SATA WD GB Raptor, and an old 17gb WD IDE drive. I did a clean install of Windows XP (and service pack 2) on the Raptor (w/NTFS file system). Windows XP assigned the older drive as the C: drive and the newer Raptor as D: drive. I didn't do anything to the older drive (it had a bunch of old files backed up on it). It's also NTFS. Wonder what would happen if you went into the disk administrator (right click on my computer and select manage and then click on disk management) and changed the d: to c: and c: to d: - -- Anti-Spam filter in place-- delete .remove-this to respond to email |
#3
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David Kistner wrote:
I "Googled" this error but what I dug up doesn't make any sense to me, so I thought I'd ask for help here. My dad's motherboard failed after we had a series of power fluxuations in our town. I replaced it with a MSI KM4M-V motherboard. Dad had a SATA WD GB Raptor, and an old 17gb WD IDE drive. I did a clean install of Windows XP (and service pack 2) on the Raptor (w/NTFS file system). Windows XP assigned the older drive as the C: drive and the newer Raptor as D: drive. I didn't do anything to the older drive (it had a bunch of old files backed up on it). It's also NTFS. When the machine boots I get "ntldr is missing" prior to Windows XP loading and it asks me to "control alt del". When I do this 2nd boot I get a clean boot into Windows XP. Everything seems to work fine from this point on (until I turn the machine on the next time and then I get the "ntldr is missing" error again. When I "Googled" on this error it appears that this happens when someone is working with a "ghosted" drive. But I haven't ghosted anything. Everything seems to work fine once I do the 2nd boot. Any ideas as to what is messed up? Is there an easy way to fix this (without having to reinstall XP again?). Thanks in advance for any help you can give me. First, make sure you have a backup of all important files. If you don't already, take the time to do that immediately after you get into Windows next time. You might have to reinstall on the new drive before hooking up the old drive. That's more or less a guess. I have done some tricky things with a disk manager (PartitionMagic) in Windows XP and have run into such errors. They are tricky errors. You might get a great answer here but you might want to ask in the storage group also. Good luck. |
#4
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Curtis Newton wrote:
On Sun, 02 Jan 2005 02:00:08 GMT, David Kistner wrote: I "Googled" this error but what I dug up doesn't make any sense to me, so I thought I'd ask for help here. My dad's motherboard failed after we had a series of power fluxuations in our town. I replaced it with a MSI KM4M-V motherboard. Dad had a SATA WD GB Raptor, and an old 17gb WD IDE drive. I did a clean install of Windows XP (and service pack 2) on the Raptor (w/NTFS file system). Windows XP assigned the older drive as the C: drive and the newer Raptor as D: drive. I didn't do anything to the older drive (it had a bunch of old files backed up on it). It's also NTFS. Wonder what would happen if you went into the disk administrator (right click on my computer and select manage and then click on disk management) and changed the d: to c: and c: to d: What'll happen is there won't even be the option to change drive letter and path for whichever drive is the system drive and the other one(s) will be changeable to anything other than the system drive. |
#5
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David Kistner wrote:
I "Googled" this error but what I dug up doesn't make any sense to me, so I thought I'd ask for help here. My dad's motherboard failed after we had a series of power fluxuations in our town. I replaced it with a MSI KM4M-V motherboard. Dad had a SATA WD GB Raptor, and an old 17gb WD IDE drive. I did a clean install of Windows XP (and service pack 2) on the Raptor (w/NTFS file system). Windows XP assigned the older drive as the C: drive and the newer Raptor as D: drive. I didn't do anything to the older drive (it had a bunch of old files backed up on it). It's also NTFS. When the machine boots I get "ntldr is missing" prior to Windows XP loading and it asks me to "control alt del". When I do this 2nd boot I get a clean boot into Windows XP. Everything seems to work fine from this point on (until I turn the machine on the next time and then I get the "ntldr is missing" error again. When I "Googled" on this error it appears that this happens when someone is working with a "ghosted" drive. But I haven't ghosted anything. Everything seems to work fine once I do the 2nd boot. Any ideas as to what is messed up? Is there an easy way to fix this (without having to reinstall XP again?). Thanks in advance for any help you can give me. - David Kistner Hard to tell without having seen how everything was done but it sounds to me, because of the 'old' drive, like the system is confused about which is the boot and system drive. Btw, the 'ntldr is missing' typically means it can't find whatever it thinks it's supposed to be booting. That can be caused by the boot pointing to the wrong partition, the partition not being primary, the partition not marked active, missing driver for the disk controller, or a problem with the boot/system files. So the first thing would be to check for those 'normal' kinds of problems. What concerns me is the 'old' drive, which I imagine has a bootable system for the old motherboard, and how you did the fresh install. It's apparent you had the old drive in the system when you did it, since it was detected as C, and that, an existing system drive, can cause problems because Windows NT/XP serializes the drives and they remain the drive letter they're initially given even when moved from master to slave, or from one IDE channel to another (although I'm not sure how that plays out when the motherboard has changed). Also, I don't know how you did the install, or what XP decided to 'automatically figure out' about the old and new drives but an existing installation of some sort in there may have caused XP to be confused about which is boot and system, not to mention your motherboard may be booting 'the wrong one' (although I'm not sure why, or if, that would change for the subsequent reboot). Point is, there's a lot of 'possible problems'. What I'd suggest is to remove the old drive and see how the system boots to try and eliminate it from the potential problems list. If it boots up 'right', first time and every time, with the old drive removed then that wold suggest the motherboard (BIOS) is not set properly and is trying to boot from the old one when it's there. If it won't boot at all, giving the same 'ntldr is missing' message all the time when the old drive is out of the system, then that would suggest XP thinks at least part of the system is ON the old drive and that's why it's confused during bootup. If it behaves exactly the same way then that could suggest a spin up time delay problem on the SATA channel so that it fails on the first 'fly through' boot attempt because the SATA drive is not yet up to speed but by the time you get around to ctrl-alt-del it's had time to spin up. |
#6
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This happens to the WinXP install disk once in a while.
When you first start the install and hit F6 to load the SATA driver(s) .. and then you get to the point where it sees the 2 drives ... you have to carefully note whether they are assigned the proper drive letters C for the C- drive, and D for the D-drive. Note, you can't undo this later after the install because you can't reassign the c-drive. What you have to do is .. right then .. delete the new primary drive which has accidently been assigned the drive letter D. Again create the partition, and it should come back as the C-drive. Also, remember this, don't put that IDE drive on IDE #1. You have to leave that blank in order for the SATA to be the primary drive. You don't need that 17gig drive either unless you are trying to slave it, and recover data ?? You have to put it on IDE #2 at any rate, and there goes your cd and zip drives, unless you don't need a zip anymore. Then you are OK with IDE and CDRW slaved to it. Also, something else to watch for. A lot of times the mobo will be marked as SATA drives #0, and #1. Several times I have put the SATA on #1 thinking that was the primary controller. That will get goofey for sure. johns |
#7
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(right click on my computer and select manage and then click on disk management) and changed the d: to c: and c: to d: I wish. You get an error message that WinXP can't reassign the primary boot partition. johns |
#8
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johns wrote:
This happens to the WinXP install disk once in a while. When you first start the install and hit F6 to load the SATA driver(s) .. and then you get to the point where it sees the 2 drives ... you have to carefully note whether they are assigned the proper drive letters C for the C- drive, and D for the D-drive. Note, you can't undo this later after the install because you can't reassign the c-drive. What you have to do is .. right then .. delete the new primary drive which has accidently been assigned the drive letter D. Again create the partition, and it should come back as the C-drive. Also, remember this, don't put that IDE drive on IDE #1. You have to leave that blank in order for the SATA to be the primary drive. You don't need that 17gig drive either unless you are trying to slave it, and recover data ?? You have to put it on IDE #2 at any rate, and there goes your cd and zip drives, unless you don't need a zip anymore. Then you are OK with IDE and CDRW slaved to it. Also, something else to watch for. A lot of times the mobo will be marked as SATA drives #0, and #1. Several times I have put the SATA on #1 thinking that was the primary controller. That will get goofey for sure. johns Thank you very much (and thanks to everyone who responded to this thread). I'll try this and report back to this thread with the results (in case someone else ever runs into the same problem). The reason I want to use the older drive is for keeping a backup. My dad mostly uses this computer for browsing the Internet, and he creates a few (very few) Word documents. He uses web mail too. For backups I thought I'd store an Acronis drive image of the primary drive on the old 17gb drive, and then disconnect it (but leave it in the drive cage)and then periodically back up his documents on CD-Rom. Then if his computer ever died like it did recently due to the power fluctuations, I should have a good image to use to restore from, and then I could simply copy his Word documents from the most recent CD-Rom backup. I thought that if the older disk drive was disconnected entirely from the mb and power it should be pretty safe). Does this sound ok to you? Or am I missing something? Thanks again for your help. - David Kistner |
#9
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Does this sound ok to you? Or am I missing something?
Sounds fine to me. It's just that I prefer doing the simplest thing. If you split the new drive C and D, making the C drive where you do most of your work, and push images to the D drive, then in the case of a crash or virus, you can restore the D image with floppies. If you also push the docs over there, they will be fairly safe too. I keep my favorites, email and downloads over there too. I like a 160 gig drive with the C set to 60, and D to 100. Right now, I have about 20gigs of program and data on C, and I update my image about once a month to D ( at about 12 gig ), and copy over backups of email and docs too. I've done this for the last 4 years, and I've recovered from every screwup I've encountered ... so far. Also I maintain several CAD labs, and I use imaging in those labs to recover from what the average college student can do to a computer :-) I can reimage my way out of vandalism at 300 meg / min ( total 15 minutes ) at work, and on my AMD64 I can reimage at 1500 meg per minutes ... 20 gigs in less than 15 minutes. Nice! I use PowerQuest Drive Image 2002 .. which has gone out of business ... sold to Norton. So I suppose Norton Ghost is the way to go now. johns |
#10
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"johns" wrote:
Does this sound ok to you? Or am I missing something? Sounds fine to me. What sounds fine to you johns. It's just that I prefer doing the simplest thing. If you split the new drive C and D, making the C drive where you do most of your work, and push images to the D drive, then in the case of a crash or virus, you can restore the D image with floppies. You can do that on the same drive too. I don't think any virus writers consider other partitions, especially not hidden partitions. If you also push the docs over there, they will be fairly safe too. I keep my favorites, email and downloads over there too. I like a 160 gig drive with the C set to 60, and D to 100. Right now, I have about 20gigs of program and data on C, and I update my image about once a month to D ( at about 12 gig ), and copy over backups of email and docs too. Backups off of the hard disk drive should be more frequent than one month, in my opinion. I've done this for the last 4 years, and I've recovered from every screwup I've encountered ... so far. Also I maintain several CAD labs, and I use imaging in those labs to recover from what the average college student can do to a computer :-) I can reimage my way out of vandalism at 300 meg / min ( total 15 minutes ) at work, and on my AMD64 I can reimage at 1500 meg per minutes ... 20 gigs in less than 15 minutes. Nice! I use PowerQuest Drive Image 2002 .. which has gone out of business ... sold to Norton. So I suppose Norton Ghost is the way to go now. Lots more people should do that, parents too, in my opinion. I use PartitionMagic on Windows XP for the same thing, except the backup is hidden on the same drive. The restore can quickly be done using the original bootable program CD. However, it is (for me) a little tricky in Windows XP though. johns Path: newssvr11.news.prodigy.com!newscon03.news.prodigy. com!newsmst01a.news.prodigy.com!prodigy.com!newssw ing.news.prodigy.com!prodigy.net!news.glorb.com!wn 14feed!worldnet.att.net!12.120.4.37!attcg2!attdv2! attdv1!ip.att.net!news.fsr.net!not-for-mail From: "johns" johns123xxx @xxxmoscow.com Newsgroups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt Subject: After fresh XP install I get "ntldr is missing" Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 14:12:04 -0800 Organization: First Step Internet (www.fsr.net) Lines: 29 Message-ID: cr9rji$cvs$1 @news.fsr.net References: IAIBd.8062$Y57.1657@trnddc08 4_SBd.18586$L7.18009@trnddc05 NNTP-Posting-Host: i181020.mos.dialup.fsr.net X-Trace: news.fsr.net 1104703922 13308 64.126.181.20 (2 Jan 2005 22:12:02 GMT) X-Complaints-To: NNTP-Posting-Date: 2 Jan 2005 22:12:02 GMT X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.2180 X-RFC2646: Format=Flowed; Response X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.2180 Xref: newsmst01a.news.prodigy.com alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt:425971 |
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