On Wed, 4 Jan 2006 18:56:02 -0800, "tradermj" <tradermj@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>I have an external hard drive that is NTFS formatted. I need to make this
>drive bootable without reformatting and deleting all the data. There used to
>be format or sys commands to do this but I cannot find a way to do this in XP.

If Windows formatted it as an NTFS drive, it is already "bootable", but not in the way you want.
The boot block is set to look for ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini

The only way to make it "stand-alone" bootable is to format it as a FAT partition in DOS then
use the sys command you mentioned. If you did that, DOS can't recognize the NTFS drive, and
wouldn't even assign a drive letter to it. You can't convert NTFS to FAT and keep the data.
You COULD backup the contents of the drive, let the IBM recovery software do it's thing, then
restore the data back to the drive....

You might want to learn a little more about NTFS. http://www.ntfs.com/

If you have access to a cd burner, see "Bart's PE Builder" (free). It will give you a complete
Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface (800x600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS
filesystem support. Very handy for burn-in testing systems with no OS, rescuing files to a
network share, virus scan and so on. http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

If you have the $$$$, you could get Winternals ERD Commander....
http://www.winternals.com/Products/ERDCommander/
This CD is pure gold for repairing dead systems.