PCTech Forums

I have gotten a new hard drive and copied one drive to the other and everything went great but when I went to boot from the new hard drive the computer says that the NTLDR is missing. How do I fix it? I need to get this computer working as quick as possible so any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

What did you use to copy the drive?

Norton Ghost

Is the partition on the new hard drive set as active?

Did you at one time upgrade win98 to Win XP on the old hard drive?
If so please read Microsoft article

If none of the above resolved the problem then you can boot from your Windows XP CD
When the "Welcome to Setup" screen appears, press R to start the Recovery Console.
Type the installation number and press enter when prompted, type the administrator password.
If the administrator password is blank, just press enter.
At the command prompt type the following:

COPY D:i386\NTLDR C: [where D=CD ROM Drive]
press enter and reboot

Ok I got I just redid Windows as I actually didn't care that much. It had a partition all to itself so I just went over it. Thank you for trying to help.

When you create a Norton floppy Ghost disk for a disk clone, (I recommend 7.5 for NTFS), You go disk to disk (laptops are different, they have a sleep partition) with the Ghost clone program.

When you finish the clone, shut the system down and REMOVE the cloned drive.

If you remove the floppy and reboot the system with both drives attached, to see if it looks ok, the cloned drive will not boot as a single drive. Only one drive can be designated as active. The cloned disk aquires active status on reboot only if it is by itself (technically thats not really correct, but it keeps things simple).

If its attached as a d drive, that aint't going to happen. You could probaly fix it, but its faster just to reclone the drive.