XP Problems

[majestictwelve]

Ok, this is my problem.
I have an old Athlon 550, with a 20 gig hard drive.
I was running Win98SE on it, and recently upgraded to WinXP (on FAT32).

Then, a few weeks ago, I picked up a 120 gig HD and added that in.
I installed XP onto THAT drive too, and I changed the drive letters (C: drive is now I: (FAT32), and the 120GB is C🙁NTFS))

Now, I'm planning on taking out my old 20 gig, but it won't let me boot off the drive.
When I try, it gives me a warning about "NTLDR is missing", possibly the problem shown here:
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/N/NTLDR.html

I'm wondering if that IS indeed the way I'm supposed to fix it, or if there's anything else someone can suggest?
I'm not willing to take the jump and do a "sys c:" in case it messes up my computer even MORE, and I won't even be able to fix it then.

I can provide more details about the situation if needed.
Thanks in advance. 🙂

 

[NogginBoink]

Run FIXBOOT from the recovery console. See if that helps.

Is ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini on the new drive? If you installed the second OS as a parallel OS, you've got different system and boot partitions. In order to make the second drive bootable, you need to lay down a partition bootsector and ensure that boot.ini, ntdetect, and ntldr are on the root of the drive.

You may also need to mark the partition active, but you wouldn't get to the ntldr error if the MBR didn't have the partition marked active.

 

[majestictwelve]

I ran FIXBOOT and FIXMBR just a few minutes ago, and I still get the NTLDR is missing.
NTLDR, ntdetect are both missing, but boot.ini is present.

I can't just copy the two files over, can I?

 

[NogginBoink]

Yes, you can.

 

[TeMpT]

One solution is to modify your boot.ini file. Sometimes Windows gets confused with partition numbers after installation of disks or repartitioning new primary partitions.

Here is what I suggest:

Suppose your original boot.ini looks like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect


What I would do is ADD 2 new entries that increments/decrements the partition number, which is 1 in this case. So I would add the following to the end:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional HELP2" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional HELP3" /fastdetect

Thus you have:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional HELP2" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional HELP3" /fastdetect

Now try rebooting and selecting one of the two new ones. If your initial partition number is 2, then I would add partition1 and partition 3. What you are trying to do is figure out where the hell windows has shifted its partition numbers. Once you figured out which is the right one, nuke the broken ones and fix your default= line.

Let me know if this helps.