Hi guys, been a while since I posted on here but I've managed to completely bewilder myself this time. First I need to give you a basic overview of my system: I have four hard drives, a 250gb and a 500gb drive both running as storage drives on sata through an addon pci card and both nearly full. A pair of 160gb sata drives running a striped raid straight from the M/B. The raid is then partitioned in two: the first half was running vista but has become obsolete as i can't get drivers for my M/B for vista 64bit and deleted the boot entry, the second half is running XP, this is actually my boot drive.

A couple of nights ago, while slightly inebriated (you know this is gonna be fun already, don't you?) I recieved the message that my 500GB storage drive was running out of room. At the time I was downloading a couple of TV shows (legally from the BBC website) to that drive, and there wasn't going to be room for them so I decided to move some stuff to the old Vista drive (the first half of my raid), but thought I should delete some files first. This I did with no trouble, but the next day when I came to start my pc I got the wonderful message "NTLDR not found". I worked out what had happened: when dual booting the newer OS handles the boot config (vista in this case) so the boot files were on my vista drive and got caught up in the rubbish I deleted.

I've tried to put the files back to no avail, I've also tried to repair XP but XP setup wouldn't see my copy of windows. I've used the "fixmbr" command in recovery console but it doesn't have anything to fix. I even added an old 6gb ide drive to the pc, installed xp on that, then tried copying the relevant files across but that didn't work either: when I put them on the xp drive it had no effect so I guess that partition's not registered as the main one on the raid, and when I put them on the vista partition and rebooted the pc decided i'd started to install xp on that drive and asked for the disk!

I'm sure if I can tell the PC to check the xp partition first I can get this thing working, or if I can modify the boot.ini to point to the xp partition from the vista one, but I've tried to do both and havn't made things any better. The only upside is that I havn't made things worse either!

I'd be really grateful if you guys could give me a hand, I'm tearing my hair out here!

James

You mentioned earlier in your post that you don’t use Vista anymore due to the fact that you can’t find compatible MB drivers that can work with it; so the question here is why are you trying to save it (Vista that is)? I’d say that if XP is your main OS on your RAID configuration, then it’s better if you get rid of Vista all together and just use XP. Of course you can go around removing files and folders, but I doubt that this will help you out; therefore I suggest that you start fresh with only XP on your RAID configuration. Another benefit of doing so is that you’ll get extra space on your drives, but make sure that you back up any important data before doing anything.

here's a way to try.

http://www.tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm

Hi guys, thanks for the help. I'm about to try running through the page you linked Surfer, and I'll post again when I've tried it all and let you know how I got on.

Dino, I think maybe I didn't make myself clear in my last post; I'm not actually dualbooting XP/Vista any more, I just havn't formatted my PC since I stopped using Vista so that partition is still the active one and still handles the boot, it just has a boot.ini file and an NTLDR file that point straight to my XP partition. It is these files I accidentally deleted and I could really do with getting back. I can copy a standard set of files onto the drive but I don't know what to change after that to tell the machine where XP is actually stored (the standard files will be configured for a single boot to XP on the active partition)

James

boot.ini is a text file.
here's mine that points to hard disk 0 partition 1

hard drives start at 0 first drive 1 second etc.
partitions start at 1 first partition, 2 second etc etc.

drive letters don't count it's always drive then partition



you can copy/paste mine into notepad, adjust rdisk and partition to match your system and save in the root of C:\ as boot.ini

in a ide or sata drive it's rdisk that matters for example


multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1) is the second drive first partition.