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?