Issues with SATA, drive names and NTLDR missing..

C

ccdeepblue22

So I have a 74GB WD Raptor SATA and a regular 40GB WD ATA hard drive.
I had the 40 GB as my C: drive with windows XP installed. Then I
bought the 74GB, installed it and partitioned it. I made D: drive
~10GB and installed Windows XP in that partition. I used the rest of
the space and made a partition called E:. Before I ****ed everything
up by reformatting the C: drive, i used to get the multi-boot option
upon startup (because I had Windows XP installed in C: and D:) Now
every time I try to boot, I get "NTLDR is missing" Now it
seems when I go into bios it doesn't recognize the SATA drive at all.
Also if I pop an XP CD in an try to reformat, it also doesn't
recognize the drive. But the point is I don't want to reformat D: or
E:. I want to delete everything on C:, then reorder my drives without
losing any data. I'd like it to go C: (10 GB partition for windows on
the raptor SATA), D:( the remain space on the raptor SATA ) and E:
(the entire non-sata drive). Does anyone know what I can do to at
least get into windows on the D: drive? What about reordering the
drives? I tried messing with boot.ini and it was a total waste of
time. RECOGNIZE MY DRIVE!

thanks for your time in advance
Chris
 
R

Rod Speed

ccdeepblue22 said:
So I have a 74GB WD Raptor SATA and a regular 40GB WD
ATA hard drive. I had the 40 GB as my C: drive with windows
XP installed. Then I bought the 74GB, installed it and partitioned
it. I made D: drive ~10GB and installed Windows XP in that
partition. I used the rest of the space and made a partition called E:.
Before I ****ed everything up by reformatting the C: drive,
i used to get the multi-boot option upon startup (because
I had Windows XP installed in C: and D:)
Now every time I try to boot, I get "NTLDR is missing"

Because that was on the 40G drive and got wiped by the reformat.
Now it seems when I go into bios it doesn't recognize
the SATA drive at all. Also if I pop an XP CD in an try
to reformat, it also doesn't recognize the drive.

You need to load the driver for the sata drive
from floppy very early in the boot of the XP CD
where it says to hit F6 to load a driver.
But the point is I don't want to reformat D: or E:.
I want to delete everything on C:, then reorder
my drives without losing any data. I'd like it to go
C: (10 GB partition for windows on the raptor SATA),
D:( the remain space on the raptor SATA ) and E:
(the entire non-sata drive).

Thats a bit tricky to do, particularly getting the XP boot
partition to be C now.
Does anyone know what I can do to at
least get into windows on the D: drive?
What about reordering the drives?

The simplest approach is to use an install in place.
Boot the XP CD with the SATA driver loaded as above.
Act as if you plan to do a clean install of XP. Dont format
any partition. Tell it to install XP into the 8G partition you
have already got it installed in. The install will say that its
found an existing install of XP and offer to repair that.
Say yes to that and let it do that. That should then see
the old D drive relettered to C and fix the problem with
the missing ntldr too.
I tried messing with boot.ini and it was a total waste of time.

Yeah, that alone isnt enough. You need to get ntldr
on the SATA drive too. If you dont do that boot.ini
isnt even relevant, its used by ntldr.
RECOGNIZE MY DRIVE!

That bit is easy enough.
 
S

Stoner Chan

Hi Chris,

You can change the BIOS's boot up hard drive priority so that SATA
dirve is at the top. Or, you can set up a boot up manager in drive c
again to redirect to the SATA drive again.

Cheers,
Stoner

ccdeepblue22 寫é“:
 

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