ntldr missing again

I have a serious issue with a customers PC and ntldr missing. I have read most of the items in this forum relating to this but nothing has helped. Note that ntldr IS in the root directory of the C: drive.

The drive initially contained a mirror created on a Promise controller. Long story but I eventually got it booting again as a single drive and now using TI WS 9.1 as the backup. It has booted every day for months.

The original problem was caused by a failed XP Pro SP2 upgrade. The drive is an EIDE.

Now to have another attempt at installing SP2 I decided to make an image of the boot drive directly onto my laptop by attaching it thru a PC card running a SATA connection to a SATA to PATA adapter with the drive temporary disconnected from the motherboard. The drive imaged well onto my laptop so I knew I now had a good copy and I could fiddle to my hearts content with the original (I also had 5 backup images on another HDD attached to the secondary controller).

But when I came to boot up the original I got ntldr is mising, hit CTRL ALT DEL.

I have done the following :
1. Checked that the original had an ntldr and it has. It also shows up in all the backup images.
2. Restored my image back from the laptop after performing a validation. Worked a treat but still get the error on reboot.
3. Tried restoring one of the other images but got same errror (so my backups over the last few months have been pointless and I know I should have checked earlier but presume I would have got the same error then. Of course this may be incorrect if my surmising below is correct).
4. Tried all sorts of things like installing just the MBR etc that I have seen suggested but nothing is working.
5. Tried an XP recovery operation but same message.
6. Tried an XP repair which left me inside an operating XP and all the customers files seemingly operating. However the first reboot same error ntldr missing.

By now I am very frustrated.
Fortunately I do have good copies of all the data (I can even install a virtual drive from the laptop image) so at the worst I can do a full reinstall and put the data back - but this will be a very long process (although it will fix the SP2 problem) which shouldn't be necessary since this is the whole purpose of doing an image backup in the first place.

Since all the above has happened (now at home calming down) I have read a lot more and I am now wondering if the problem might be something that happened when I did the first backup onto my laptop and it has somehow caused the original drives first partition to stop being active or permissions being changed. Everything I had subsequently done probably wouldn't have changed them back again. Also another MS article suggests that there are several things that can cause this error (although, for example, I can't see how boot.ini [and other files] could be changed because I am supposedly copying back each time the originals)

I cannot believe I am the only person who has had this problem. The ability to copy off a customers boot drive as a backup using my laptop looks to be a good idea but so far it hasn't worked.

I am doing my best to convert customers to using TI image backups (and selling the program) instead of using mirrors because I see far more problems caused by software than hard drives failing. But everytime I hit these "gotchas" that make me doubt the usefullness of TI.

Can anybody shed any light onto what is going on

 

Hi chriscalvert,

see if this helps :

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318728

F.

 

Perhaps I should have added te following -

The original system has an Intel CPU with adequate memory.
The boot disk of size 40GB with about 8GB data on a single partition and on the primary channel. No slave device.
The secondary channel has a CD drive as master and a second 40Gb drive as slave holding daily image backups.
The system has TI WS 9.1 build 3633 from memory.
My laptop is a recent HP laptop with a Celeron CPU and 1GB memory. I am using TI WS 9.1 build 3718. The hard drive is partitioned into 40GB and 60GB with the image going onto the second partiton. From the laptop hard drive to the original systems hard drive are the following components -
hard drive - PC Card with 2 x SATA ports - SATA cable - SATA to PATA adapter with the adapter and HDD powered from the system - system HDD.
I am reasonably certain that there have been no errors in making the image.

 

Thanks foghorne

It is one of several MS things that I have noted to try tomorrow. Pity my initial google searches didn't show me this today (now 11.55pm here).

 

In the early builds of ver 9 (the home version) there were many reports of that ntldr error. I also had it and none of the workarounds I read online solved mine. Like your situation, the file was not missing. I believe I only got the error if I tried to restore an image to a drive that was much larger than the original. This was some time ago so the actual facts are fading from memory. LOL. I think I was restoring from a 2-gig hard drive to a 30-gig hard drive. But if I restored from the 2-gig to a 6-gig the restore was good. Since I was only experimenting I didn't try to find a solution. And I got tired of being an unofficial beta tester so didn't pursue it further.