New Hardware Problems

[Viper_Maniac]

I tried asking this at another forum but didn't get much help. Actually none at all. So I figured hopefully someone here can help.

Ok I finally got my new power supply today and I hooked it up. Turned the computer on and started having a few problems.

1.) I have a SATA and IDE hard drives. Both are Western Digital. I first tried to setup Windows on the SATA as it is the bigger and newer drive. Its a 250GB and I wanted to set it up for 200GB(the other 50 would be for Ubuntu) but during setup it showed it as a 137GB drive. I then used WD Data Lifeguard Tools to set it up as well as my IDE drive. After that it showed up as 200GB and went on and installed Windows. Now it shows my SATA drive as D: (DRV2_VOL1) and my IDE as C: (DRV1_VOL1).

2.) It seems that it needs my XP disc in my cd drive to boot up. I took it out after Windows and some chipset drivers were installed. After that 3 times in a roll it came up as "NTLDR IS MISSING: Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart.". I put the disc back in and boots up just fine.

This is my hardware: Athlon64 3500, ASUS A8N-SLI Premium, 512MB Dual Channel PC3200, EVGA Geforce 7600GT, Soundblaster Audigy, WD 250GB & 80GB HDDs, 2x LiteOn Drives(CDRW & DVDRW), Silverstone 500W PSU

What should I do? What did I do wrong? TIA.

 

[wfooshee]

I've never installed from scratch onto those WD drives, I've only copied an existing drive to it using the utility that comes with it. I do know that without the WD driver, you don't get the full capacity of the drive, which has pretty much switched me to Seagate.
The message you describe will occur if the partition number changes from installation time, i.e. it was installed on partition 1, and for some reason that became partition 2. The BOOT.INI file is where this is configured, which, strangely enough, is VERY hard to get to if the machine won't boot!
You can use a CD boot utility like the Ultimate Boot CD to access the hard drive and edit the file, or if you can get to the hard drive by booting your installation CD, maybe you can fix this.
The BOOT.INI is a hidden, system file in the root of the C: drive, with syntax like:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect


The partition number may be different on yours, and may need to be different from what it is. Try 1 and 2, possibly 3. The error you're getting is telling you that NTLDR is not on the specified partition, therefore Windows (the NT part) can't be loaded (the LDR part).

 

[Viper_Maniac]

I think I figured it out. I decided to reinstall Windows XP on the SATA drive with the IDE drive disconnected. I'm now in windows and formatting the IDE drive to be the second drive. I also forgot to change the boot drive in the boot menu option that comes up when it shows "Hit 'del' to enter setup" after you startup/restart the computer. I think everything will be ok. I'll double check everything once its done formatting the IDE drive.