windows: NTLDR not found

[Liyun Yu]

This might has to do with the BIOS.
In the working machine, the hard disk drive was
recognized correctly by the BIOS.
In the non-working machine, the BIOS might still
remember the old disk (heads/cylinder/sectors), which I assume
the old disk was not exactly the same as the "new" one, therefore
it did not know where to find the Windows Loader because the hardware
parameters assigned to it was from the old disk drive.

The NTLDR may be translated to "NT LoaDeR", which
is used to load and boot the OS in Windows since Windows NT.

Would you please try to access the BIOS of the non-working one, when you
power on the non working laptop, and let it re-recognize
the hard disk, then save it, then reboot it?

Liyun


>
> "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
>