P
Paul
philo said:If the drive was totally blank you'd get an error message such as "non
system disk".
I beleive the first file to load would be NTLDR so if it's missing you
will of course get the "NTLDR missing" message.
So it looks like the problem is in the MBR
I found some MBR tools here, they may be useful but I've never tried them.
http://www.raymond.cc/blog/5-free-tools-to-backup-and-restore-master-boot-record-mbr/
From Linux, you can pull the MBR with something like
dd if=/dev/sda of=mymbr.dd bs=512 count=1
and then use hd or hexdump (with the -C option being
commonly used for canonical mode), to display the 512 bytes.
Then compare the MBR, to MBRs documented on the web.
( http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/index.html )
http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/Win2kmbr.htm
That page says the MBR has:
0120 32 E4 8A 56 00 CD 13 EB D6 61 F9 C3 49 6E 76 61 2..V.....a..Inva
0130 6C 69 64 20 70 61 72 74 69 74 69 6F 6E 20 74 61 lid partition ta
0140 62 6C 65 00 45 72 72 6F 72 20 6C 6F 61 64 69 6E ble.Error loadin
0150 67 20 6F 70 65 72 61 74 69 6E 67 20 73 79 73 74 g operating syst
0160 65 6D 00 4D 69 73 73 69 6E 67 20 6F 70 65 72 61 em.Missing opera
0170 74 69 6E 67 20 73 79 73 74 65 6D 00 00 00 00 00 ting system.....
and "fixmbr" is what fixes that one.
No mention of NTLDR.
The partition boot sector is inside the C: partition itself. Not sector 0.
This is the part that "fixboot" fixes.
http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/NTFSBR.htm
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
7D83 0D 0A 41 20 64 69 73 6B 20 72 65 61 64 ..A disk read
7D90 20 65 72 72 6F 72 20 6F 63 63 75 72 72 65 64 00 error occurred.
7DA0 0D 0A 4E 54 4C 44 52 20 69 73 20 6D 69 73 73 69 ..NTLDR is missi
7DB0 6E 67 00 0D 0A 4E 54 4C 44 52 20 69 73 20 63 6F ng...NTLDR is co
7DC0 6D 70 72 65 73 73 65 64 00 0D 0A 50 72 65 73 73 mpressed...Press
7DD0 20 43 74 72 6C 2B 41 6C 74 2B 44 65 6C 20 74 6F Ctrl+Alt+Del to
7DE0 20 72 65 73 74 61 72 74 0D 0A 00 00 00 00 00 00 restart........
7DF0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 83 A0 B3 C9 00 00 55 AA ..............U.
Paul