Kidnapped!

  • Thread starter Thread starter poltonis
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poltonis

....with apologies to Robert Louis Stevenson. My WinXP
installation was kidnapped by a single file NTLDR. This
was accidentally deleted from the C:\ Root folder. On the
morrow, the PC could not get past the ..."verifying DMI
Pool Data"...NTLDR not found".

Salvation to my existing setup came in the form of using
the Repair function in the existing Windows XP
installation CD. To my relief everything was intact,
logon-on users, program files, desktop etc.

My question is this. In the event of something similar,
is there an easier way to access the other partitions,
apart from the default C:\Windows? (as a boot-disk in
Win98?) I knew I had moved the file NTLDR to my D:\ Data.
 
Hi, Poltonis.

When the computer is powered up and starts to boot, it remembers NOTHING
from the previous session. All it knows is what is in its read-only memory
in the BIOS. The BIOS knows how to start the HD spinning and read the very
first physical sector, which holds less than 512 bytes of code. This
includes the MBR (Master Boot Record) and the partition table for that first
HD, including the designation of one partition (usually the first one) as
the Active (bootable) partition, which it typically assigns the letter C:.
It reads the first physical sector (the "boot sector") of that partition,
which is outside any folder and is not a file. The boot sector is only 512
bytes and knows little except to look in the Root of that partition for a
file called NTLDR; C:\NTLDR is the ONLY file that the NT-style boot sector
knows to look for. NTLDR then looks for C:\boot.ini and C:\NTDETECT.COM and
uses those to find and load the rest of WinXP, no matter which HD or which
partition they may be on. But, if it can't find NTLDR, or if NTLDR is
corrupt, everything stops.

Often, NTLDR is right where it's supposed to be and not corrupt, but
something is wrong in either the MBR, partition table or boot sector. This
causes the boot process to look in the wrong place and whatever it sees sure
doesn't look like NTLDR, so it panics and puts up the message you saw. The
Repair facilities on the WinXP CD-ROM provide utilities to fix the MBR and
boot sector so that they point to the right place.
I knew I had moved the file NTLDR to my D:\ Data.
Click to expand...

It never looks in D:, unless that's the Active partition (unusual, but
possible - the partition table would have to reflect this). And it never
looks in \Data, or any other folder except the Root, "\". You can have 50
copies of NTLDR scattered all over your drives, but the only one that counts
is the one in C:\.

As Patti said, you can create a boot floppy that contains A:\NTLDR,
A:\boot.ini and A:\NTDETECT.COM. They are relatively small files and total
less than 400 KB, so they easily fit on a floppy. A:\boot.ini should point
to the second partition on your third HD - or wherever your \Windows folder
is installed. Then when you set your computer to boot from A:, it reads
these few files and uses them to bypass Drive C: and find WinXP.

RC
 
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