windows: NTLDR not found

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

(Disclaimer: I'm not a windows person. My only contact with 
windows is to help other people who use it. So I'm not real 
familiar with windows).

I moved a working W2K disk from one thinkpad to another of 
the same vintage (from a 390 to 600, both are about 5yrs old 
PIIs, approx 300MHz). On attempting to boot the new 
installation I get

"NTLDR not found" (or whatever)

message.

I move the disk back to the original machine and it boots 
just fine showing that NTLDR is there. NTLDR is visible if I 
mount the disk on a linux machine.

As a control, I exchanged a Linux harddisk between the same 
two machines and they both boot up just fine, giving me a 
perfectly usable machine (startx works etc), showing that 
the two harddisk controllers are treating disks the same way 
and that there's not a lot of difference between the two 
machines.

googling tells me

o Microsoft says that NTLDR is missing and I should boot off 
the rescue disk and copy over NTLDR. This is obvious 
nonsense and I'm not going to risk stewing a working 
harddisk by booting off a rescue disk in the non-working 
setup (it may work on the new machine, but not on the old, 
or it may not work on either anymore).

o other people say that somehow NTLDR is above the 1024 
cylinder limit (and there are more than 1024 cylinders in 
the partition). If this is true then it shouldn't be 
bootable on either laptop.

In the past I've had similar problems installing windows 
(W98, W2K) on one machine (which has the CDROM) and moving 
the disk to a similar i586 desktop machine (which doesn't 
have a CDROM) I get the "NTLDR missing" message there too.

Any ideas anyone?

I looked at www.tritug.org - they don't have a mailing list
from what I can see.

Thanks Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml 
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!