fao glosrfc

[seagoon]

you helped me out before glosrfc so I am trying you again. Same 14yo brat new problem. pc wont boot says missing ntldr file, tried loading wnxp over current instal says not enough room only 2mb left (180gig drive) used fdisk to check partition says it is fat12 not ntfs. tried partition commander to reassign ntfs but confusion over what the drive is ie c 0 or whatever. any clues apart from a very dead 14yo.

[Win2Win]

You can't read NT file systems outside of Windows, so it won't show up in DOS, etc.

Does XP boot from CD/DVD and FIX the installation?

[seagoon]

hi keith, I can get as far as the win xp install repair screen. Ive tried fixmbr etc and tried to overwrite win xp but it says only 2mb available. I think that is because the fat12 doesn't see a large drive. I've quiizzed the kid but he denies ever touching it(wifes machine) he is a menace to machinery.

[GlosRFC]

You're right...FAT32 doesn't recognise larger drives. Was it formatted to NTFS before? There is sometimes a problem in XP when it tries to write data to an NTFS drive in that it tries to do it too quickly. The recommended solution is to boot into Windows repair mode and to run a chkdsk with the /p command. If that fails, try the /r command.

With the missing NTLDR message, I'd first check that your hard disk is properly configured in your BIOS. If that is okay, try to copy the NTLDR and NTDETECT files back onto your machine. First, boot with your XP CD. Press R to repair, then 1 to logon. Enter your logon password then copy the two missing files into the root directory of your CD drive, e.g.
copy d:\i386\ntldr c:\
copy d:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\
where d: represents your CD drive.

There are a few other things you can try that might help but see how you get on with those first.

[Win2Win]

A friend of mine had a similar problem, never told me till after he'd buggered his system, but as he counldn't see any data on the drive (it was in NTFS), he reformatted and reinstalled XP, and lost a hell of a lot of work :splapme :geek

[seagoon]

thanks for the advice guys i'll let you know how i get on this evening. tavm

[seagoon]

finally cracked it in a way. used various well known partition managers to no avail then i heards about this freebie called test disk by some chap called christophe grenier. i was able to rename the partition as ntfs and from that point reload xp. lost the data though but there wasn't anything vital in there.

thanks for your assistance guys.