NTLDR mysteriously missing

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Sat Apr 15, 2006 6:02 pm

well seems that my fathers PC has taken a giant crap. he goes to boot it this morning and the almighty......

NTLDR is missing

Press any key to restart

decides to appear. now strangely at the same time, the HP HDD Recovery Partition has also failed to respond. all it takes is pressing F10 at POST Test to access it, but it fails to do anything as if its not even there, or possibly the drive has physically failed. im posting this just shy of taking the drive out and checking it in my box, and checking it THOROUGHLY with multiple AV Scans and hardware diagnostics.

im leaning towards the drive actually failing due to the fact that while booting the PC, i put my ear next to the drive itself and listened and felt for the usual sounds and vibrations from the drive POSTing itself.........drive spindle starts up, but there is no vibration and clicking of the voice coil on the read/write heads.

other than the simple Speedfan 4.28 SMART Scanner, are there any good HDD Diagnostic programs out there?

BUBBALOU · Post by **BUBBALOU** » Sun Apr 16, 2006 8:53 am

Go buy a new HD, and slave in the old and MAYBE you can recover the files...

Dont attempt any type of file recovery until you have the new drive up and running and O/S installed

you have been warned

Neo · Post by **Neo** » Sun Apr 16, 2006 9:12 am

I love you, Bubbalou. ^_~

heh...Seriously, though...Once, someone I know had a similar problem \"NTLDR is compressed...\" of course then, you have to decompress the file using the attrib command in the recovery console. ^_^ Now, if it was encrypted, then you'd have to use cipher.

Jeff250 · Post by **Jeff250** » Sun Apr 16, 2006 5:09 pm

Boot to recovery console on your XP disk and type:
fixmbr
fixboot

BUBBALOU · Post by **BUBBALOU** » Sun Apr 16, 2006 8:53 pm

Think about this for a moment..... look to whom you are giving advice to and what kind of advice you are giving.....

Once again just go out and buy a new hard drive and then recover the files after you are up and running.....

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Sun Apr 16, 2006 9:41 pm

did that bubba. father went and grabbed a quickie 40GB Drive and i slaved it with my box.

strangely though, the drive actually worked on my box <-- ?

its entire contents, + the HP Recovery Partition were intact and were accessable without any problems. when i checked the SMART status, that drive is just as healthy as when he got it brand new?!?!?!

Speedfan gave it a 99% Fitness report only one item was not at its factory new status, and that was : RAW_READ_ERROR_RATE which was showing a 69 as factory new, and a 67 as current data. everything else checked out.

now im thinking bad hardware..... grabbed my DMM and checked the +5 and +12 rails of his PSU, all good. checked for the dust bunnies, all clean. i thought for a moment, if the drive is working on my box, but it is only missing a NTLDR file, ( and i checked with my box and there was no NTLDR ).....so i tried something, i copied the NTLDR from my XP Pro onto his drive. and booted the drive in his HP...... PRESTO!! it boots normally!

okay now im like WTF?

i still cant get the BIOS HP Recovery Partition option to work, so dad is going to order a CD Set from HP just as a precaution. but at least he has a extra 40GB Drive to use now

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Sun Apr 16, 2006 10:11 pm

I've seen NTLDR (or other important system files) get toasted on systems with no HDD problems and fixed it with chkdsk before. IIRC the system that did it had a CPU fan that went dead. So it could have been a heat related issue from the fan. Just keep an eye on the HDD for a while to be safe. Course I never really trust even healthy HDDs anyway.

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Mon Apr 17, 2006 8:10 am

its been running solid for 48 hours now. Cd's will come in tomorrow. and im still trying to work out a few details with HP on figuring out why the BIOS Recovery option suddenly started failing. Tech Support may send out a floppy with a new BIOS rom and have me flash it to restore the HP Recovery Option, if all else fails (resetting the CMOS jumper)

i know for sure its not a heat issue. PSU does a good job venting out all that warm air from the case. i bought a better HSF for my box and took the original CoolerMaster P4 heatsink and fan from my box and placed it on his Celeron 2.0 CPU with AS-5 as the compound, it wont go any higher than 42C under a full benchload.

Richard Cranium · Post by **Richard Cranium** » Mon Apr 17, 2006 1:58 pm

Noting who we are talking about

Did you try ejecting the floppy?

RC

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Tue Apr 18, 2006 5:14 pm

very funny smacktard