Help! freind has formated drive and now it insist on being primary boot??

Jimbo

Jimbo

Jimbo

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A friend of mine has formated a disk using some sort of file system for the nintendo Wii.. it must have changed his IDE drive to C: WBFS (thats the drive letter and the file system.

The problem is.. now it does not matter, if the OS is on another hard drive,be it sata or IDE... it allways trys to boot from this drive. it gives it NTLDR is missing?? there is NO operating system on there.. it should boot from his E: drive and not this C: drive..... does this make sense??

Help??
 
You have nearly 4800 posts and don't know that NTLDR is a boot loader for loading operating system? :p

Anyway, NTLDR is NT Loader. It handles all the operating systems contained on hard drives connected to a system. So the boot loader, NTLDR, was probably housed on the drive that was formatted. EVEN THOUGH the actual windows operating system is based on another drive.

Have a look here... See if you can follow that and see if it helps ;)

Try getting into the BIOS and setting the FIRST BOOT DEVICE as the hard drive with Windows on. (Or whatever OS you have on the second drive)

Hope it helps pal ;)
 
Lol, no you dont get me. The OS was and had the boot files E: (SATA).... but since he did something with the drive C:(IDE) it allways goes and trys to boot from that drive.

I have wrote back the NTLDR files and to E: and no joy. There is no OS on C: or Boot files. I have installed windows again on E: it boots fine when the C: drive is dissconected.. but trys to boot from E: when its connected even though it has no OS or boot files.. and gives NTLDR is missing.. it was formated using this WBFS file system... and no manner of drive config or bios setting helps.

I know what NTLDR does.
 
C:, E: etc are things windows writes to the drive. The bios knows nothing about them, and the drive is not able to tell the bios to boot from itself. However whichever drive is called first can have data on it which loads the OS from whichever drive it wishes.

If you've reinstalled windows to the drive while it's the only one present it should have called itself C:. It's a bit of a long shot, but is the windows partition the only one on the drive? If so you can simplify things by overwriting the first 512 bytes on the drive with zeros, this removes the partition table. It's then formatted like a new drive and windows should install properly.

I think this is a result of installing windows to one drive while a different one is connected, and windows cocking up slightly.
 
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No the boot loader is on E: but if we plug in C: we cant boot. If it was on C: couldnt we see it in dos and delete it??

How do you do it again? lol.

Very confusing!!
 
If the boot loader is on the e: drive I don't understand why it isn't called c:. Best guess is that when installing windows a trace of the previous boot loader persisted so it set itself up much like before. Is nuking the drive partition table and formatting from scratch available?

I don't know how to do anything in dos I'm afraid, dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 will remove all trace of previous formatting under linux, and probably under osx.

Otherwise you could just give up on this and install grub, though this only appeals to me because I know more about grub than about ntldr
 
put your friends harddisk(with OS) in another pc, right click my computer, go to manage. then Disk Management. then find the hard disk which belongs to your friend and then right click and choose "Make partition as active".

then put it back on his pc and it should be fine. happen to me a few times too lol.
 
Yeah but this is the whole problem.. we cannot put this drive in another pc and try to boot.. because it trys to boot from this drive! and just throws the error message NTLDR is missing.

We are not trying to boot from it, just boot from another drive and then get access to it. He has files on there he does not want to lose is the thing.

Its weird.. even if you select another drive with a working copy of the OS on.. this case being XP, it looks to boot from this buggered drive first.. it must do cos it gives that error message.

We can access it through the recovery console, via dos... is there a way to set is as inactive in there, or can we use partition magic or a util from Maxtor?
 
Can you not put the drive into a usb/firewire external caddy then turn it on once you get into windows?

Alternatively you could download an ISO of bartPE, burn to cd then boot up into bart and copy the files you want using A43 file manager, once this is done nuke the drive.
 
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This is just what my mate said, we are gonna try it. Its an old IDE drive and i never knew he had a caddy, it sounds like a good shout.
 
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