NTLDR - wierd problem

[barryng]

I am having a problem when booting with the NTLDR file. The following sequence of events prceded this problem.

1. I started out with a single 120 Gig bootable SATA drive on the SATA 1 port (ABIT IC7-Max3 mobo).

2. Installed a new unformatted identical 120 Gig SATA drive on the SATA 2 port and used Ghost to clone it to the SATA 1 drive. This was just a simple way to format the drive as my DOS boot up disks do not recognize the NTFS file system.

3. Booted normally into Windows XP off the drive on the SATA 1 port. Using Windows Explorer, I did a "Quick Format" of the SATA 2 drive as I intend to use it only as a location to store multi Gigabyte video files. I then copied about 25 Gig of video files to it.

Now, every time I try to reboot, I get the NTLDR missing error message and the computer refuses to reboot. If I simply disconnect the SATA 2 drive's data cable the computer will boot up without problem on the SATA 1 drive as it is supposed to.

What is happening here and how can I use the second drive as just a data storage location without running into this problem? I don't think every drive in a Windows XP system must be configured as a bootable drive but it seems to appear that way.

 

[KF]

How is the BIOS set to boot? HD0?

My guess it that the BIOS is booting off the SATA 2 drive when it is present. At the point NTLDR takes over, the boot continues to the drive and partition designated in BOOT.INI, which is the SATA 1 drive. When you formatted the SATA 2 drive, the NTLDR file was removed, but not the boot sectors. Therefore you get NTLDR missing. When you unplug the SATA 2, the BIOS goes to SATA 1, and the boot sequence goes all the way.

I don't see why the BIOS is booting first from SATA 2 (if it is) but as an experiment you could switch the drives, and it should give you a different error beyond "NTLDR missing."

There was a person recently who had this with an ATA HD, where the computer tried to boot from the second drive first. Maybe there is something you can do in the BIOS to make it boot from SATA 1?

Copying NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM and BOOT.INI to the second drive ought to work around the problem, but might open you up for other oddities somewhere down the road.

Possibly removing the "active" mark from the partition on SATA 2 might cause the BIOS to skip it and boot from SATA 1.

You can boot from the XP CD and choose Recovery Console. This gives you a command line version of XP. It will look for an OS on the HDs, and you will have to know the Administrator password (normally your password if any.) After it is done, you can type HELP to get a list of commands. You can get help for each command by typing the command followed by /? The partitioning program is called DISKPART. After typing DISKPART, you can try deleting all partitions on SATA 2, and then creating one partition. Hopefully that will remove the "active" mark from the partition on SATA 2.

If you would rather copy the files I mentioned, do :

COPY C:\NTLDR D:\
COPY C:\NTDETECT.COM D:\
COPY C:\BOOT.INI D:\

When done type EXIT.

> This was just a simple way to format the drive as my DOS boot up disks do not recognize the NTFS file system.

But you can partition and format from within XP, which you already had on the first drive.

 

[kursplat]

KF

But you can partition and format from within XP, which you already had on the first drive.

zxactly - control panel/administrative tools/computer management/disk management. aren't SATA drives hot plugable ?
if so , just boot to the main drive on SATA1 and then connect SATA2 , format and good to go .
good luck

 

[NogginBoink]

Drive 2 probably is enumerated by the BIOS first, which causes the BIOS to attempt to boot to that drive.

It's not an OS issue.

Go into disk management and ensure you have the right partition marked active. I don't know enough about SATA to tell how to determine which order the drives are enumerated in. Check the BIOS boot order.