Ghost2003 Disk Clones - ntldr problems

I have searched through the forums, postings, microsoft, symantec etc. to no avail. Problem persists.

The system: IBM Thinkpad X31, 100Gig HDD
OS: Windows 2000

Prior actions:Used Ghost 2003 to clone drive as backup. System drive was 100Gig Hitachi. the clone is 100Gig Fujitsu
Situation: The system HDD crashed
Action: Replaced bad HDD with the clone
Result: "ntldr missing" and cannot boot. ntldr is in correct directory and boot.ini points to the correct directory
Action: made a bootable floppy and restarted system.
Result: The system boots and I am able to use the system with some minor glitches. Without the floppy the system still gives "missing ntldr "
Additional comments: Followed a bunch of routes that were suggested in postings including fixboot, fixmbr and using the original windows 2000 CD to do repair. No luck.

Question: Anyone have a solution to the problem where the system can run without the floppy?

Other comment: When I got this computer a couple of years ago, it came with an 80Gig drive. I Ghosted the drive to the 100 Gig Hitachi. I had the exact same problem as now. But at that time, I ran across a posting that gave instructions as to how to change settings of the drive so that the system boots. It worked. Unfortunatelly, I lost the instructions and cannot located them on any of the forums. Help on where to located these instructions or how to correct the problem would be appreciated.

 

Hey Christer,

Thanks for the welcome.

It was a disk-to-disk cloning with the original hdd in the notebook and the clone in a USB cage running ghost in DOS prompt. No pre-preparation to the disk drive. It was a fairly straight forward process with no gliches. As far as I remember, it was the same process I used 2 years ago. When the problem arose then, I googled and found the solution. There weren't as many hits then on the problem as there are now. I think the solution involved manually doing a simple edit of the mbr. I wish I knew what I did with those instructions! During this current crisis I went as far as stripping the laptop to bare minimum (one hdd, no cradle, no external monitors, no external mice, no modem, no wireless etc.).

I should mention that the original hdd had two partitions and so does the cloned one (disk-to-disk clone). Something tells me that it has to do with where the mbr is pointing to on the drive. File system is correct since the system boots to the OS with some proding from the floppy boot disk.

bulltoad

 

Thanks for the input Christer. Can't confirm that. Just can't remember, sorry. I did the clone last March. There is some information out there that recommends flashing the hdd to IBM OEM firmware. Since this is the only drive with the data and progs that I need, I'm skeptical to say the least! Flashing an almost working hdd? What do you think?

Get some sleep... G'night

bulltoad

 

Christer,

Confirmed:

1. Drive is set to master. If set to slave, get OS not found error, if set to cable select, get a blinking cursor and nothing else.

2. C: primary partition (where OS resides) is marked as active.

I still think that I need to edit the MBR. But can't find instructions as I did in the past.

Bulltoad

 

Christer,

Thanks for the support. Our discussions sparked a few thoughts and memories. The problem is resolved.

Here's the short of it. The problem occured because the clone hdd has different geometry heads than the original. To resolve and correct this, I needed the following:
a) A windows98 boot floppy with sys on it
b) A windows2000 recovery floppy with fixboot on it (I used the Win200 CD)

Procedure:
1. Boot using the windows98 floppy
2. At the command prompt type sys c:
3. Confirm that the system is to be transfered to c-drive
4. Should receive cofirmation that it was successful
5. -- If you want to see if this worked, take out the floppy and reboot. Win98 prompt will be your confirmation (no longer the "ntldr missing" message)
6. Put the win2000 emergency floppy and boot to command prompt. In my case this disn't work because win2000 booted as described above. I used the Windows2000 CD recovery console. That is started the machine from the CD, and directed it to go to system repair under the recovery console option.
7. At the prompt, type fixboot
8. should receive confirmation that it was successful
9. Turn off system
10. Restart the system from hdd only (no floppies no CD)
11. --- Success ---

More general details can be found at microsoft http://support.microsoft.com/kb/255220/EN-US/

I hope this helps some of the tortured souls out there with a similar problem to mine. Cheers!

bulltoad

 

Yup, I ran across it during my search for the fix. I think my problem was that for some reason, I must have initiated the new drive with windows98 from the prompt (can't really remember details). Then I used ghost on it assuming that ghost would overwrite everything. Apparently, it does not and hence, my problems.

 

Glad you got that sorted

Heres some other info, hope this may be of help to others.

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/kb...hooting/Windows2000ERDandRecoveryConsole.html

I've been using Acronis of late ( rather than Ghost ), the softwares good, boots into a GUI and has many support features usb support etc.

Worth having a look at for system imaging.

Cheers