Boot problem: frequent "can't find NTLDR" message

That fixed it!

But now comes the "my face is really red" part of this whole problem. Remember back in post #7 of this thread, I made this comment:

"One thing I notice, is that the "detecting IDE drives" message takes a long, long time to clear when I get the error. Also when this happens, it fails to detect the primary slave drive altogether, but the other two drives, boot, and secondary master, are eventually listed. I have checked the list of detected drives and it lists the actual correct drives ".

Well, that should have been a big clue to me that it may not be the boot drive that was causing the problem. I just made the assumption that DR1 meant the boot drive, but actually the boot drive is listed as drive 0. So I am thinking that there is really nothing wrong with that drive and that somehow not being able to detect the slave ******* up the sequence, and the boot process then looked for NTDLR on the wrong drive. Also, the three year warranty on the slave drive expired almost a year ago.

Even though the system on the new drive appears to be OK so far, I am going to try using the old drive for the system and the new drive for data. If I don't get any error messages or have any boot problems for a few weeks, I will leave the system on the new drive, but remove third party programs. That way I can always boot it in an emergency.

If all is well, I'll follow up in a few days. If not I'll re-post right away. Thanks a million for all your patient and expert help.

Bob

 

heh! thanks for following up on that. the devil's in the details

 

What I forgot to mention...

in the previous post was that I also got another DR1 failing message in the event viewer, after installing the new drive.

 

Follow up

Well, four days of booting cleanly, cold, several times a day, are making me very happy. No more disk messages in the event log. Looks like the "can't find NTLDR" was truly caused by the failure of the boot operation to detect the failing primary slave drive, and not any problem with the primary master (boot) drive. I think that this messed up the boot sequence and NTLDR was sought on the wrong drive.

 

Ain't it great when FIX stuff works.