windows: NTLDR not found

[Steve Wills]

I'm guessing the laptop sees the disk geometry differently than the 
other systems. See if you can manually set the disk geometry in the bios 
of the new system to the same geometry the old system sees.

Just a guess. Good luck.

Steve

(Geometry is disk dependent, which may help explain why the linux disk 
had no problem.)

Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
> (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
>