NTLDR is missing after using Disk Director

Disk Directory killed my PC - Well disabled it temporarily.

I was splitting my existing C: partition into two, it booted into the resizing process then after it completed my PC wont boot now with NTLDR is missing.

Using UBCD4WIN I can see the C drive and it looks intact. Fortunatly I had a 2nd drive in the PC which had a bootable O/S on it, so I was able to copy ntldr and ntdetect.com from that drive to the root of the C:\ drive and it restored the operation of my PC, the rest of the work Acronis had to do was run and everything came up fine.

To ACRONIS: This is a pretty MAJOR FLAW in your software!!!!!! I cant believe you have released software with this bug in it.

 

The problem is most likely, either the MBR was corrupted or boot.ini is pointing to the wrong disk partition.

XP can lose track of NTLDR under many circumstances as MS's knowledge base will attest, just having the drive geometry change can cause NTLDR to go all sniffy.

Colin

 

Way to glibly blow off his problem. I suspect Disk Director has some culpability here, as it just did the same thing to me, twice. On my brand new Dell XPS with RAID.

Moreover, I DON'T have another bootable partition on my computer that I can use to help me recover. I don't know what to do, now. And the nicest part? The DD and True Image "rescue" CD's tell me that they can't see any hard drives. So, not that useful to me.

Why does the user manual claim that "in windows, DD can perform all of its operations without rebooting" ? It made me reboot both time, and both times if failed to recover from the reboot.

Yeah, I'm pissed.

 

I too have found out that Disk Director 10 is "BOOT HAPPY". I have spent over a month trying out DD10 and it does (and un-does) the most contrary things imaginable (contrary to the manual that is). Funny thing is that often repeated booting up the DD10 rescue disk (and randomly trying out all sorts of inanities) somehow "cures" small flaws inexplicably ( finally booting into an otherwize sleeping windows is one of these re-booting miricles in my case). As I have numerous machines and extra hard drives preloaded with all my set-ups I have decided to approach DD10 as a puzzel to be figured out (this is a strategy to maintain my sanity). Unfortunately most people buy DD10 because of the "Ease" of use promised by the propagada on the box (on page 3 of the manual they do a 180 and disown all of the promises printed on their glossy box). I think they should become honorable and print this disclaimer on their box in plain sight. One day I hope to be able to do what I bought DD10 for: to multi- boot an insulated version of the factory pre-loaded software. If this could be accomplished I will be satisfied with the 49 dollars spent for DD10. The worst part is that I turned down an offer by my brother (who is a programmer) to set up my main new machine to do exactly this! For now I am still switching Hard drive cables to use a hard drive made exclusively for internet use. Non-the-less I refuse to give up until I'm successful.

 

I suggest downloading and reading MS's FAT layout documents (NTFS is not available for free scrutiny), however NTFS adds signatures to it's boot sector which include things like encoding the serial number of the harddrive - NTLDR when instantiated uses these plus drive geometry in registry to boot the system proper.

Perform a search on MS's knowledge base for 'NTLDR Missing', and you'll find many many things can cause this problem. DD10 would be culpable in the fact that resizing a partition will alter the MBR and might affect the boot sector information.

It could be argued and I would agree, that DD10 should make sure that the info XP requires should be updated. However, as XP itself is known by MS to be touchy in this regard, we can't be certain that it is DD10's way of operating that is the root cause of the problem.

Now if you want to talk about OSS losing track of it's boot info, not booting OS's correctly - I'm with you.

 

I agree there is a 'strangeness' and not a good one, in that DD10 often works better in manual mode than in automatic, which Is the one many people would opt for.

Colin

 

I wonder if the Dell hidden partition and possible non standard BIOS throws a spanner in the works?

Have you tried using safe option from the rescue CD's, and failing that the F11 quiet..... screen? Though it is possible that the Dell F11 option might still override the Acronis one.

I think this is part of Acronis' weak points. Poorly written and misleading (in English) manuals.

Do you have access to an XP CD of whichever flavour of XP that you have?

Once back into XP, it is possible to make an XP install CD as the contents of the I386 folder will be on the hard drive as part of the original install.

Colin

 

JoeHD Not great ....

I would check your boot ini files from the recovery console it is likely that the arc paths are different now.

http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Content/315/13/3.html


NTLDR can be restored from the xp install cd

You don't use any overlay products like norton goback?