Re: NTLDR is missing

Many thanks.

I have arranged for him to be able to download a boot disk.

The position now is that I advised late last night that he should run
XP setup and at the right time delete all partitions and install to an
ntfs partition at the front of the drive. Since he keeps his O/S
separate to his data and most applications he should make the
partition about 10 or 12 Gb.

All seemed to be well but he installed Norton Security and it went
online and downloaded updates but not all of them. He was advised to
restart and download the rest of the updates later. On boot up
"nothing worked". He phoned me as he was on his way to the pub to
drown his sorrows.

I am going to drive down to London on Sunday having first studied all
the advice I have received.

I am in two minds how to approach it. I could take a W98 boot up disk
with me, or buy a cheap second hand HD with no history with his
machine, or take a w98 laptop.

Fdisk and I are old friends but would it really do a better job than
XP setup? Would the boot up disk even run since all other boot disks
have failed (apart from XP setup)?

He keeps insisting that his BIOS is corrupt but I don't think that can
be so.

It seems really strange that so many drives are failing. It can't
even be a loose connection since all three ports would have to have a
poor connection.

Thanks again.

Colin

On Tue, 5 Jul 2005 20:08:45 +0100, "John Barnett MVP"
<freelanceit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Just a thought. has he got a windows 98 or ME startup disk? If not download
>one from www.bootdisk.com It doesn't matter if he has a FAT32 or NTFS file
>system for this excercise (Win 98 ME startup disks will not work with NTFS -
>but we are not out to use the disk for anything spectacular)
>Insert the floppy into the floppy drive and reboot the machine. Now if the
>file system is FAT32 the floppy will boot to the 'A' prompt. In this
>instance, at the 'A' prompt type: fdisk and then press Enter. This will
>allow you to remove the partition from disk0 and then recreate a new one (or
>more than one if you need to)
>If the file system is NTFS you will simply get the option to use fdisk.

.

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