Booting XP failed

I have a failing boot drive, so I cloned the entire drive bit by bit to a second drive attached to the MB. When I tried to boot the cloned drive, I get the message NTLDR missing, and the boot won't complete. However this cloned drive boots fine when I dual boot it. I have seen this message before, but forgot what it means and how I solved it. Bios recognizes the two drives as being swapped.

 

Hello charlibob and welcome,

Search for NTLDR in the XP forum - lots of references. If no joy, post back.

Regards - Charles

 

Insert your XP cd and boot to the recovery console:

FIXBOOT

 

NTLDR, along with BOOT.INI and NTDETECT.COM are the three files required to boot XP. These need to be found at the root of the active partition on the drive. They are hidden system files and may have been missed during the "cloning" of the drive.

DRD

 

All three files are there, and running a file compare against the same files on the old drive found no discrepencies.

 

Most likely cause with what you describe is the ARC path in your boot.ini file is pointing to the wrong location then.

Did you do the fixboot command from the recovery console as suggested? That usually takes care of this particular issue, usually.

 

Thanks for the replies eveyone.
I haven't run fixboot yet, Newt. Right now the two drives are back in their orgignal positions so I can use the computer. Can I point the recovery console to the cloned drive and have fixboot run properly even though it isn't the current boot drive? What does the ARC path refer to? Here is a copy of boot.ini which is the same on both drives now.

[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS= "Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect
C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT= "Microsoft Windows Recovery Console" /cmdcons
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS= "Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition (#1)" /fastdetect

I wonder about the "rdisk(1)" entry which I haven't seen in other sampe files.

 

http://windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=43059]Check this thread.[/URL]

DRD

 

I think I may have discovered the problem

I thought I would run partition magic to see if I had a hidden first partiion that was preventing the boot loader from running NTLDR. I have used partition magic on this machine before, but perhaps not with the existing second disk that I cloned and am now trying to boot. Patition Magic gave me an erroe message while initializing, sayint that EZ Drive was detected, but not running on the second disk, and I should reboot and hold Ctrl C before reinserting the Part Mag boot disk. However that just won't work, and it simply boots to Windows instead.

What is EZ Drive and why haven't I seen any messages about that before? I do remember seeing something abut EZ BIOS not running when trying to boot the second drive. My Bios should be able to handle this disk without any patches.

I think when I cloned to this drive, I overwrote some important drive operating paramaters. I have downloaded WD's setup utilities, and am considering reinstalling this drive, and letting their utilities make it the boot drive and do the cloning over. Anyone see any reason not to do this, instead of trying to patch the present cloned installation?

 

If you can still read the data from your failing HDD... I would write zeros to the new drive then clone it again.

There is no reason to use EZ-Drive on your system unless your BIOS won't support a HDD of that size. (unlikely)

 

Problem finally solved

Like most unusual problems, the solution was very simple, but not too obvious. This is a dual boot system, with XP home sp1 on the failing drive, and old XP no sp on the secondary drive. At some point in the history of xp on this computer, the boot ini got modified so that after starting the process on the primaty drive, it then pointed to r1 my secondary drive to finish the boot (boot only, not loading windows) process. When I cloned the drive and tried to use it as the boot drive, there was simply no secondary drive from which to finish the process. I edited the r1 parameter to read r0 and was able to boot from the cloned drive. That simple. I have no idea how the original change to the boot.ini happened. Ah well, thanks for all the help and suggestions.

 

Sorry for the delay in responding and glad you already have things fixed. Didn't want to leave the ARC path piece hanging since that was, indeed, the source of your problem.

BOOT.INI and ARC Path Naming Conventions and Usage is an old NT 3.x article but they have retained the same naming conventions through 2K/XP/2003 so it's probably worth a read. One page article.

 

Thanks for the aricle Newt