Computer Hope
Microsoft => Microsoft Windows => Windows Vista and 7 => Topic started by: Jek Hawkins on August 26, 2007, 10:57:39 AM
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When you see NTLDR, yes, that darn thing again.
OK, I HAVE checked the Q&A, etc. etc. Googled "NTLDR is missing", "NTLDR is missing RAID array", etc. etc.
But NOONE has had my situation yet, or so it seems. Here's the situation. I just installed Windows XP Professional SP2 on a computer with the following hardware:
MSI K8N-Neo4 Platinum Edition (BIOS was reflashed to include latest updates from MSI)
2 WD1600 SATA (old SATA) hard drives with RAID 0 enabled via NVIDIA nForce 4 controller total 320GB (theoretical)
ATi Radeon X800 512MB PCI-X (SAPPHIRE for Radeon)
Creative Sound Blaster Live! 5.1
Sony CD-RW 52x, Sony DVD-ROM 16x, Sony floppy disk drive
450W power
1GB 2x 512MB Corsair ValueSelect low-latency
AMD Athlon64 3200+ clocked 2.01GHz
did I miss anything...? Hope not...
I'd been running the brand new installation of XP Pro 2 just fine for oh, a week or two, today I went online and got VLC Media Player for the codecs, I had just gotten it on my laptop w/ Vista and seen pretty good results with it in terms of compatibility and capability. After the installation, I restarted the computer (I usually do that to ensure proper installation and registration. To my utter surprise, (and uber frustration) the computer POSTed and wound up with the "NTLDR is missing Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to restart). I did, no change. So I came online and Googled "NTLDR is missing", and the first link was the one to the page on this site addressing the issue. OK, well, I knew my drives were OK because they were powered and were running, and they were detected by the motherboard as "RAID STRIPE HEALTHY WD1600 + WD1600", which is correct. So I tried the boot from CD, which would open up successfully to the point where I was supposed to hit "R" to repair. Well, Setup says there are no drives detected TO REPAIR, when I am 100% sure they are working properly. Now, I have a theory, when I used to only run a single WD1600 SATA, the SATA cable had to be changed periodically, I guess due to heat and bending in the case. Could that be a solution? I rejected that idea because I figured the array wouldn't really be healthy then, so I haven't tried it. Otherwise, I'm dead stumped. Does anybody have help on this?
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Because you are booting to the setup disc it is not loading your installed drivers...look early on in the setup process for the pressF6 if you need to install RAID drivers and have your SATA driver disk handy...
Let us know.
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oh, right, lol ;D. I completely missed that. Of course, as luck would have it, I can't find the bloody RAID disc. I just had it, give me a few... ???
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lol, thx, patio, i got the OS back running, but it gave me a boot.ini failure just before windows started. is that a problem since windows started correctly?
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Post your boot.ini file here and we'll have a looksee...
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crap, it's doing it again. for once my lappy is actually WORTH using!
:P
ok, hold on, i'm going to run through that process again
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WOOHOO! This computer is seriously BLAZING FAST!
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where the heck is boot.ini?
I thought it was in i386 or system32?
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odd, it's not on c:\ either
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You can go to Start/Run and type in msconfig and hit Enter then copy and paste it from there...
BTW it's in the root directory of C:
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dang, man, i feel like such a n00b ???
i've done the run msconfig, what do i do now?!
(sorry if i'm being very annoying, i seriously gave up doing this kind of thing so many years ago...)
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Clik on the boot.ini tab...
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um...
there isn't one
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screenshot attached
[Saving disk space - old attachment deleted by admin]
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Hmmmmm.....
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v81/patio/msconfig.gif)
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From what I've been able to find on the web, the Boot.ini tab will only appear if Msconfig is able to find access it. So if your boot.ini file is corrupt or missing it wont show up in msconfig.
You might want to try this fix to make sure your boot.ini is present and error free.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330184
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ok, thx.
i'll boot my compy and try that. is it possible that boot.ini was just deleted? i don't know how the computer would start without it tho...
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It won't...
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ha, ok, thx deerpark. looks like things r working again, and my msconfig has boot.ini in it now...
we'll see if that does it (it looks like it will)
the last time i ran the ntldr fix, it worked once, then i restarted to check it and it worked again, so i assumed it worked, but the time after that when i started it it gave me it again
looks like no boot.ini startup error message, and i restarted 3x to check things, using restart and shut-down start-up and it looks good. we'll see about my bad luck, but thanks to all the guys who took the time to help and look at the thread!
;D
CASE CLOSED