try setting ur HDD to 1st boot device

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_______________________________________________
Lawrence Lee

"ANONYMOUS" <ANONYMOUS@NEWSGROUPS.COM> wrote in message
news:43AA3B70.58BEA3B9@NEWSGROUPS.COM...
>
> Welll than you didn't do a through search. For example what is this:
>
> http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314057
>
> hth
>
>
> "Christopher R. Thompson" wrote:
>
>> Hey... Sorry for all of the crossposts, but I wasn't sure who would be
>> interested. I see about 7,500 messages with the "NTLDR is missing"
>> problem. Nothing I could find said anything about how to fix it or what
>> is wrong.
>>
>> My setup is ASUS P4P800SE MB 1 Gig Memory SATA ICH5 w/ 2ea Maxtor
>> 6Y160M0 smart drives. The stupid CDROM won't boot up the XP install so I
>> copied all of the files from the cd onto another computer and then moved
>> the whole directory to one of hard drives with Win98SE running on the
>> opposite SATA channel and then ran the XP setup program.
>>
>> Everything works great until I get to the second boot where the "NTLDR
>> is missing" message appears.
>>
>> The problems began with the shipped drive geometry of cyl=317632 hd=16
>> spt=63 for a grand total of 320173056 sectors of 512 bytes for 164 Gig
>> each. In this configuration Dos FDISK partitions a maximum of 27 Gigs
>> each partition. I wanted two partitions on each drive of 80 gigs. I
>> don't exactly know why the hd number is important for LBA access, but
>> when I increased it to 256 I got my 80 gig partitions. With new geometry
>> of cyl=19852 hd=256 and spt=63 I was able to succesfully install Win98SE
>> into the boot partition. Then I copied the WinXP installation folder
>> onto the other boot partition and started the install. This was a "new"
>> install not a recommended "UPGRADE," and I asked for the advanced option
>> to select the drive and partition to install into at install time. The
>> install copied some files, rebooted into NT and then performed all of
>> the system checks and did more file copies and rebooted again. When the
>> boot failed I switched the bios to boot the other drive up, and checked
>> out the XP drive. All of the files were written to the partiion using
>> hd=256, but the partition table, or boot record I don't know which had
>> changed the number of heads to hd=255. NTLDR was there with all of the
>> rest of the bootup files, but the boot loader didn't know how to find
>> 'em and none of the partitions were on cylinder boundaries anylonger.
>>
>> I probably shouldn't say this here, but I used a linux box and the
>> sfdisk and fdisk utilities to change the geometry back to the original
>> settings. fdisk won't directly change geometry, but sfdisk will, and if
>> you just hit enter at the end of sfdisk it will make one big partition
>> out of the whole drive. Then you can come back to fdisk and repartition
>> back to the original settings without destroying any of the data inside
>> of the partitions. Switch the bios back to the XP drive, reboot and the
>> installation continues normally.
>>
>> So I guess the moral of the story is "Don't use hd > 255!"
>>
>> Hopefully someone else can figure out why this occurs and prevent it
>> from happening in future service packs.
>>
>> Regards, C.T.
>>
>> P.S.
>>
>> For the Video People...
>>
>> I can't seem to find my TVIEW installation
>> cd for my Brooktree 878 video card. I've been running the card on
>> Win98SE for several years, but XP doesn't seem to like the drivers on
>> the "new" installation for some reason. Something about a class
>> rejection. Any suggestions?
>