NTLDR Missing - using Raptor Drive

[Droobie]

Okay, so I picked up a Raptor drive at Fry's Electronics last weekend because it was finally priced to the point of where i thought it was a good deal. I faced a few issues on install, and I believe they were all related to my final resolution. I'll describe my problem and fix in the hopes that it can save someone else some frustration.

 

Bought a 36GB Raptor from Fry's. First attempted to do a clone disk of my existing 200GB C: drive (yeah, it's usually near empty) to the Raptor and try to pull a quick switcheroo.

 

ended up having some troubles getting my raptor recognized as both the boot drive and C: drive at the same time.

 

Much to my dismay, I re-installed Windows XP onto the raptor (dismayed because everything was tweaked tight in windows). Everything worked great. Until I tried to recover data from my IDE drive. I reconnected the signal to my old IDE drive and It seems that whenever I booted the computer, it would try to load the OS from the IDE hdd instead of the SATA raptor, ending up w/the error "NTLDR missing." Even happened when I had the DVD ROM hooked up to the IDE (instead of the old IDE hdd) w/the Raptor at SATA.

 

Familiarity told me to check my recovery options on the winxp install disk. Tried "fixboot" and "fixmbr" with no positive results.

 

On a whim, I used the boot menu (esc at startup) to start off the Raptor drive. Worked. Choice...

 

I had hoped the setting would "save" and it would work again on the next boot. No luck..."NTLDR missing" again. Made me think....there was a delay induced by my choosing the boot menu. Perhaps this delay had something to do w/my issues?

 

My "wait for hdd" was set to "0" in my BIOS (I'm impatient). I flipped it to "2" and it solved my problems. Boots free & clear into Windows every time w/o the NTLDR missing error.

 

Perhaps there is an increased latency on a certain signal or power bus during startup for SATA drives? All speculation, of course.

 

Anyway, if you're having the same issue, increase the wait time for your hdd a bit in the BIOS, might give you some luck.

 

Hrm...other notes.

- Raptor was connected to SATA1 on the Nvidia SATA

- Ended up where I wanted to be; IDE hdd and dvd drives working (IDE ch1, ch0 respectively) in sync w/the SATA Raptor as the boot.

[Logger]

Thanks for the tip Droobie. I will be hooking up my neighbours' harddrive tomorrow, with OS on it.

[EvoFighter]

This happen sometime, but not really related to NF4. I removed a CD-RW drive from a P4 machine to use temporary in another PC but the P4 system won't boot up saying the same thing - "NTLDR" missing. After I hook the drive back..viola..everything back to normal. I think this is WinXP issue, not really pertaining to NF4.

 

Edit: The P4 is utilising a simple 1 SATA drive only (with multiple partitions though), no Raid or anything complicated.

[Droobie]

This happen sometime, but not really related to NF4. I removed a CD-RW drive from a P4 machine to use temporary in another PC but the P4 system won't boot up saying the same thing - "NTLDR" missing. After I hook the drive back..viola..everything back to normal. I think this is WinXP issue, not really pertaining to NF4.

 

Edit: The P4 is utilising a simple 1 SATA drive only (with multiple partitions though), no Raid or anything complicated.

 

Good point. This may not be directly related to the nF4. I posted in this forum, however, due to the fact that I own a DFI Lanparty UT nF4 SLI-DR.

 

Figured it may help some others, since it may be a quirk of this motherboard, not necessarily nF4.

 

In any case, thanks for the reply.

[steelballzz]

i had my 1st sata drive just a few days ago along with a new dfi ultra-d....i had the same issue...had to set 2 secs delay and all works fine now

 

weird