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ntldr is missing

C

cubby1223

Lifer
Working with a Toshiba laptop (WinXP). Very, very long story short (believe me, the full story is a helluva lot longer than this) - I made a ghost backup of the drive, and am trying to put everything back onto the hard drive.

There is no data corruption because I can use a boot cd with ntldr & boot.ini and get into Windows no problem. There also are no problems with the boot.ini & ntldr & other system files on the c:. But dang it. And none of the recovery console commands fix it either. Repair install does nothing either.

Trying everything I can think of, but no luck. This attempt, I began a new Windows installation, wiped all partitions on the drive, and created one partition the full size of the drive. Ran through the initial setup of XP, to the first reboot, so that the drive knows how to boot from that partition. Am in the middle of a partition to partition copy of the backup to the laptop hard drive. Maybe the MBR will be left untouched and Windows can boot from the hard drive once this is done. I don't know.

Anyone else have luck? There are many forum questions found by google, but so far none have a solution other than reload Windows from scratch. I've tried many common web site links to solve this. I'm near positive the problem is related to a second "unknown" partition on the drive put there by Toshiba and not fully identifiable by Ghost.


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Got it working, found an alternate way to get the files back onto the laptop hard drive.
 
Go into your system BIOS, make a minor change, exit and reboot. That usually solves the problem.

I had it happen yesterday after cloning a drive.
 
After another hour of searching everything on google, I think I have a clue. Originally searching, most everything said that ntldr missing errors are from incorrect drive geometry in the bios. I found a post now that says that laptop hard drives are detected by bioses differently in laptops than in desktops. So it gives me something new to work with, not sure exactly how I'm going to use this knowledge to my advantage yet...
 
I think I know what I need to do now, but every attempt at trying to do so results in massive failures...

I have two computers sitting side by side. A desktop machine with a 3.5" drive that has the partition I need to move to the other. Next is the laptop. The desktop will run Ghost 2003, but not Ghost 9. The laptop will run Ghost 9 but not Ghost 2003. The laptop also has faulty usb ports, which was the entire reason I started looking at the damn thing in the first place, so external drive enclosures are not working.

I have to do a partition copy from within the laptop, not the desktop, as the bios's detection of hard drive parameters is the most logical reason why I get the "ntldr is missing" errors. But dang it, I don't know what to do, I would just throw the laptop against the wall - but it ain't mine.
 
I've looked over those links dozens of times, that's not the problem. I found a good logical suggestion, and I'm trying to solve that right now. Unfortunately every way that can get the job done is not working for stupid reasons. I put Norton Ghost 9 on my own computer now and have the 3.5" drive that I need to pull the data from, and the dang image file is approaching 6gb! When I made an image file with Ghost 2003, the file was 2gb in size. So this means I cannot put the image onto a dvd, which is the only way I can get an image onto the laptop... Can't use the 2003 image file, because 2003 doesn't work with this laptop.

It's just been a long night, a long morning, and nothing works...
 
I did get the dang thing to work after too many pointless hours of screwing around.

No matter what I did, ghost always was messing up with the partition structures, which I think is what put nt loader out of whack. So I then figured, maybe files are just files and nothing more! I started a fresh install of XP on the laptop up until the first reboot, so I have a working, booting drive. Then I hooked all drives inside my own desktop. Then just a straight copy from Windows Explorer of everything on the drive.
 
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