NTLDR is missing

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G

Guest

Firstly i know that there are 100's of entries for this problem but looking
through them doe snot solve my problem.
I have a 30gig toshiba 2.5 laptop drive from my Sat Pro A10.
I have a maxtor 2.5 60gig drive
I have ghosted the old drive to the new drive but get the above error when I
try to boot the laptop from teh new drive I get the above message.
Their are 2 partitions on the drive the primary is FAT32 (dont ask why) the
other is NTFS.
I have tried just ghosting the one primary partition but with no luck.
I dont want to convert the source primary FAT32 partintion until I get the
new drive up and running.
My os is XP Pro.
I have tried copying the NTLDR file etc

HELP!
 
dpnews said:
I have a 30gig toshiba 2.5 laptop drive from my Sat Pro A10.
I have a maxtor 2.5 60gig drive
I have ghosted the old drive to the new drive but get the above error when I
try to boot the laptop from teh new drive I get the above message.
Their are 2 partitions on the drive the primary is FAT32 (dont ask why) the
other is NTFS.
I have tried just ghosting the one primary partition but with no luck.
I dont want to convert the source primary FAT32 partintion until I get the
new drive up and running.
My os is XP Pro.
I have tried copying the NTLDR file etc


We're not clairvoyants.

1) Which HD is the new one?
2) How many partitions are on the old HD?
3) What are their formats?
4) What is on each partition?
5) What utility are you using to do the copying?
6) What are you telling it to do?
7) How are the HDs connected during the copying
and during the booting?
8) How are the HDs jumpered during the copying
and during the booting?

*TimDaniels*
 
Old drive
Toshiba 30gig
Primary partition 18gig FAT32 XP Pro
Second partition 12gig NTFS - stores all my documents

New Drive
Maxtor 60gig

Using Norton Ghost 2002
Have tried drive to drive copy and part to part copy of just the primary
partition.

During copy the old HD is connected as secondary master, new drive is
primary master. (This is done using a tower PC)

During boot the new drive is put back into the laptop
 
dpnews said:
Old drive
Toshiba 30gig
Primary partition 18gig FAT32 XP Pro
Second partition 12gig NTFS - stores all my documents

New Drive
Maxtor 60gig

Using Norton Ghost 2002
Have tried drive to drive copy and part to part copy of just
the primary partition.

During copy the old HD is connected as secondary master,
new drive is primary master. (This is done using a tower PC)

During boot the new drive is put back into the laptop


As I recall, Ghost asks you whether to mark the cloned
partition "active" and whether to copy the MBR over to
the new HD. Did you select both options?

During the boot process, the BIOS passes control to the
MBR of the HD which is at the head of the HD boot order
(if there are more than one HD connected). The MBR
passes control to the boot sector of the Primary partition
that is marked "active", ignoring other partitions. The boot
sector then passes control to ntldr in the same partition.
So there must be a good MBR, "active" Primary partition,
and a good boot sector to find ntldr.

BTW... terminology. There is no "secondary" partition
on a HD. There can be up to 4 Primary partitions on a HD,
or 1 Extended partition plus up to 3 Primary partitions.
The OS can reside in any of these partitions - a Primary
partition or in a Logical Drive in an Extended partition - on
any HD in the system. The one selected tor booting is
controlled by the boot.ini file which is at the same file level
as ntldr. ntldr and boot.ini and ntdetect.com are what are
known as the "boot files".

It's unusual to copy between drives on different IDE channels,
i.e. between the "primary" and "secondary" channel, but there's
nothing wrong with that.

One thing that might get in the way: When making a clone
of a WinXP OS, do not let the clone OS see its "parent" OS when
the clone is being booted for the first time. (It gets permanently
confused). Instead, disconnect the "parent's" HD before booting
the clone. Then, after the clone has been run, shut down the PC,
and you can then re-arrange/re-jumper the HDs, and if you want,
the old HD and the "parent" OS can be visible to the clone when
the clone boots up subsequently. If the clone was allowed to
start up in the tower PC immediately after the cloning while the
old HD was still connected, that *might* have caused the current
problem.

*TimDaniels*
 
I have made some progress but still not there yet.

I have created a ghost 2002 partition image from the promary xp partition of
the old drive onto a FAT32 partition on that drive.

I then copy the image file to a FAT32 partition on the new drive.

I then install the new drive into the laptop and ghost the image to the
primary partition on the new drive.

Once done the laptop will then boot from the new drive but hangs as the
logon screen.
The screen does not show any user names (welcome style screen) and only
shows the windows logo that you normally see on that screen.
 
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