NTLDR is missing after ghosting

[Guest]

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.configuration_manage (More info?)

Hello,

Situation:

Windows XP Pro, SP1. Ghosted from a 30Gig drive to a 60Gig drive.
Everything went well. When I attempted to boot from the 60Gig drive, the
system failed giving a "NTLDR is missing" error. After a tremendous amount
of troubleshooting, repeated attempts to ghost (with switches to ghost that
no longer appear to be valid, etc.), copying the ntldr and ntdetect.com
files from the CD in the recovery console, using fixboot, fixmbr, and
bootcfg functions of the recovery console, and reading a couple of articles
in Microsoft's KB, I have come to the conclusion that the ntldr and
ntdetect.com files have probably been written beyond the 2Gig limit.

Has anyone come across a utility, hack, black magic incantation, or anything
else which might resolve this problem? I am currently using a boot floppy
to boot off of the 60Gig HDD since I really need the space.

TIA,
Ken

P.S. The machine is an IBM Thinkpad A31p. I have read similar posts from
people using Thinkpads, I have just not encountered any solutions yet.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.configuration_manage (More info?)

I had the same problem happen to me once and solved it this way.

First I downloaded disk investigator from www.theabsolute.net/sware.
This was the only program I could find that would tell you where a file
is physically located on a disk.

Run the program, click on view directories, then select ntdetect.com or
ntldr and click on view. At the right top of the screen you'll see the
clustor/sector information relating to the file. It should be pretty
easy to see which one is at a large sector value and needs to be moved.
In my case, it was ntldr.

What I did next was pretty simple. In explorer I right clicked on ntldr
and selected copy. Then I simply pasted about 20 copies to the c:
directory. Fired up disk investigator and looked at the sector values
for each of them. What happened was that the sector number increased as
each copy was made until a point when it dropped down but not enough to
place it in the low sector region - so I had to free up some space in
low sectors. I looked at the files on c: using disk investigator and
saw that pagefile.sys was down low. So I turned off the swap on c: and
after more copies (maybe as much as 20 again) I got a copy in low space!

Success - so just delete the old ntldr and rename the copy to ntldr and
off you go! (And restart the pagefile again if you turned it off before)

FYI my ntdetect.com and ntldr are at sectors 704632-704639 and
774448-774465 so this should give you an idea of a good place for them
to be. p.s. disk investigator reports 512 bytes/sector in case your
sector size is different.

Good luck!



Ken Stapleton wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Situation:
>
> Windows XP Pro, SP1. Ghosted from a 30Gig drive to a 60Gig drive.
> Everything went well. When I attempted to boot from the 60Gig drive, the
> system failed giving a "NTLDR is missing" error. After a tremendous amount
> of troubleshooting, repeated attempts to ghost (with switches to ghost that
> no longer appear to be valid, etc.), copying the ntldr and ntdetect.com
> files from the CD in the recovery console, using fixboot, fixmbr, and
> bootcfg functions of the recovery console, and reading a couple of articles
> in Microsoft's KB, I have come to the conclusion that the ntldr and
> ntdetect.com files have probably been written beyond the 2Gig limit.
>
> Has anyone come across a utility, hack, black magic incantation, or anything
> else which might resolve this problem? I am currently using a boot floppy
> to boot off of the 60Gig HDD since I really need the space.
>
> TIA,
> Ken
>
> P.S. The machine is an IBM Thinkpad A31p. I have read similar posts from
> people using Thinkpads, I have just not encountered any solutions yet.
>
>
>

 

[sweetenham]

IBM or any other OEM may have a hidden recovery partition
Use this switch to overcome this issue ghost -IA

It work on my IBM T43

Best Wishes Pal