After fresh XP install I get "ntldr is missing"

[David Kistner]

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

 

[Curtis Newton]

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:


-

 

[John Doe]

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.

 

[David Maynard]

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.

 

[David Maynard]

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.

 

[johns]

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

 

[johns]

(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

 

[David Kistner]

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

 

[johns]

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

 

[John Doe]

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.