NTLDR IS MISSING

[herbal718]

I recently purchased a new hard drive, 200gb Maxtor(6Y200PO)OEM . Now I already had the same drive which I purchased retail and it came with a PCI mass storage card. I also have a third drive, WD 36gb raptor hooked up to my serial ata onboard port(asus a7n8x deluxe mobo). I moved all the data from the old 200gb hd to the new one. I then proceeded to format and partition the old drive using the Maxtor Maxblast cd-bootable software disk. I already had a winxp installation on my WD raptor drive, it was under D:\windows. But before I had gotten the WD raptor drive I was using the first maxtor drive as my main bootable device running from the motherboard ata under c:\windows, now I noticed that sometimes before I installed the new 200gb when I would try and install programs the default drive would be set to c: insted of d: which had my active winxp installation. I didn't think much of it then but now I think that's where the conflict is somehow. After I moved all the data I hooked up both 200gb hd's to the maxtor pci card. Now I wanted to do a fresh install of winxp on my wd raptor so i boot from cd and prepare for installation. After all the basic files were copied and windows reboots to complete the installation I get a NTLDR is missing press CTF ALT DEL to restart message. Weird thing is that when I go into the maxblast bootable software and look at the drives is that the two HD's show up as primary master and primary slave and the wd raptor shows up as secondary master. Also I was able to install winxp on the wd raptor and was able to boot up to windows with the other two drives unplugged, but as soon as I plugged the other two drives into the pci card I get the NTLRD is missing message. So it looks like somehow the boot sequence is being read off the maxtor drives instead of the sata drive. I searched for this answer a lot and it seems that i've tried anything. Please help me, I've been at this problem for three days now, weekend wasted at this headache of a problem. Thanks in advance

 

[sjonnie]

A rather confusing post but the source of your problem is that you have WinXP installed on D: and not C: Whilst that is possible it can lead to problems because the C: drive must contain the boot files that tell the computer where to find the OS files. The switching of the hard drives means those files are not on C: anymore. Why not set your maxtor to C: and the other drives to D: and E: and install XP on C: like most normal people?

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/myanandtech.html?member=114979" target="_new">My PCs</A>

 

[herbal718]

I am installing it like normal people. Sorry if I didn't make this post more reader frendly, but I would much rather have some valid input much rather to having you criticize how I install an OS. Thanks though.

 

[etp777]

Sounds like a bios problem, it's reading the pCI card first, rather than SATA(as I'm guessing you have to set it to SCSI or pci add in to get either one to boot). Might try changing pci slot on card, or getting rid of it completely. If SATA and ata are on pci cards, try switching them around. If the SATA is onboard, try just using the onboard pata sockets. A motherboard that has SATA onboard should be able to handle 200gb hard drives. If not, there's probably a BIOS update out there to allow that.

Worst comes to worse, edit boot.ini on the primary master pata drive and point it to the SATA drive.