Hard drives

[D.Arbib]

Use XP pro, Asus A7V333 motheboard, BIOS rev 1015, AMD 2700 and 512MB PC2700 RAM.

Recently put in a second, identical Maxtor 80 GB drive,"D", into my computer with a view to making a duplicate back-up drive.

The new drive has XP pro installed from my CD.

However, on booting up, I have no option to boot up from "D"
and when I try to boot from the BIOS selector for "D" I get
"NTDLR is missing" "Press cntl+alt + del" which enables me to swap back to Master drive "C" and I can then boot up normally.

I have no idea what "NTDLR" means nor how to replace it, so that I can boot up from "D".

Need advice, please

 

[D.Arbib]

Can't find boot.ini and "search" fails to find it. Need help

 

[CrashAbbott]

I dont know if you will have that option?? Just correct me on this if my thinking is skewed,, bit of a party last night,, still paying for it,, but when you installed the second hard drive ,, is it by chance on the same IDE ribbon? and could you possibly have it set to slave??

I am thinking that you would have to edit the ARC path to find the NTLDR file on the D drive,, plus , I am thinking that the second drive should be master of the Secondary Controller on the MOBO,, if not,, the Boot path will look at the master ONLY on the Primary controller named C:,, it will not even KNOW that the NTLDR exists on another drive,,

Try making the Drive a Master on the Secondary Controller,, might have to switch all the settings for your ROM drives,, but hey,, life aint that simple anyway,,,

It would be great if XP did give a LILO type interface,, and the BOOT.INI might only show up if DIFFERENT OS's are installed,, part of a multi-boot install ,,, but seeing as they are BOTH XP,,wellll??? what does a motherboard know anyway??

give it a shot,, might take a bit of tinkering..

cheers

 

[D.Arbib]

To MicroBell
After hidden file searching for boot.ini I found "deflwk" and "dwup" have a line: %BootDrive%\boot.ini",2,"D(A;;GRGX;;;PU)(A;;GA;;;BA)(A;;GA;;;SY)" What is this about, please?

To CrashAbbot
In "Boot setup" the second drive is described as "Slave" and is not on the same ribbon. NTDLR does not exist on hidden file search in either setups. Do you know what NTDLR is anyway?

 

[CrashAbbott]

NTLDR is the NT loading file,,," loader"=ldr

it is the file that tells the machine how to load the environment basically,,, where to look for what etc,

I have not seen any articles that refer to dual booting with the same OS,, that may be the issue with the boot.ini,,

I still think that you should look at something called the ARC path,, and edit it not to look in drive 0 for the NTLDR but to look in drive 1(?) for this file,, in this method the machine will go to THAT drive,,

do a search on editing the ARC path,, will give more insight,,

cheers,

 

[D.Arbib]

CrashAbbott. I am a junior techie and have no idea what you mean by editing the ARC path. Thanks for explaining NTDLR, obvious when you know! All I am trying to do is to have a mirror image on "D" so that, in the event of a malfunction on "C" I can recover from "D"

MicroBell. Your url leads nowhere because the details of dual boot comes up wirh "page unavailable". I searched for hidden files and folders and ccertainly didn't locate in either "C" or "D" a file of the sort you you give above and boot.ini, as I described, is only found deeply embedded in the 300k plus files indicated. Will Drive Image 5 sort me out?

 

[D.Arbib]

I found boot.ini in REG.SZ Value name
000
Value date
boot.ini

Binary value 0000 62 00 6F 00 6F 00 74 00
0008 2E 00 69 00 6E 00 69 00
0100 00 00

A complete search of both drive C and D failed to find boot.ini other than in various programs. Still can't locate anything like
as mentioned before. The url given takes me back into M% and concerns itself with differing OS's and only one drive into which I had looked before.

 

[D.Arbib]

Addition to above. I tried running C:/boot.ini and finally got more or less as MicroBell suggested, viz:

Time out= 30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS
OS =multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\ WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP professional"/fast detect

There was nothing about kernels, etc

I could not run D:/boot.ini

Still does not get me anywhere to access my slave drive.

 

[CrashAbbott]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows

Ok,, sorry there ,, sometimes I get so tied to the work, I forget to back up,, sorry,,,

MB has actually shown the ARC path in his copy of his Boot.ini I have pasted it on the first line,,,

basically the ARC path tells the PC if you have a SCSI drive, an IDE drive, which drive the boot files exist on etc,,,


TO MB,,

that edit that you made in your path with the KERNEL line,,, that is interesting ,, does that by chance increase your boot speed?? I am trying different things to speed the boot process,, and that one I havent tried,,

just curious,,,,

Apologies to D.Arbib,, i think i was a little testy yesterday,,

 

[D.Arbib]

Yes, I see the slave drive on booting up. I can also select each drive from the BIOS setup, but, as I've already said I get NTDLR is missing. And I haven't a clue how to find it! The point is that I did re-format "D" and re-install XP pro twice already (which is boring, to say the least) and still cannot get proper selection.