rakusuira Posted February 24, 2006 Share Posted February 24, 2006 Major probems! T_T I booted off a dell windows xp reinstallation disc, loaded the recover console but was not asked for the drive to use for xp, or for an administrator password. i still tried the stuff in the wiki though Attrib -H -R -S C:\Boot.ini returned: The parameter is not valid. Try /? for help. DEL C:\Boot.ini returned: No matching files were found. BOOTCFG /Rebuild returned: Scanning all disks for Windows installations. Please wait, since this may take a while... Error: Failed to successfully scan disks for Windows installlations. This error may be caused by a corrupt file system, which would prevent Bootcfg from successsfully scanning. Use chkdsk to detect any disk errors. CHKDSK /p returned: The volume Seria Number is 0000-0000 The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems. 10344 kb total disk space (no way that is right.. its a 250gb drive( 3456 kb are available .. I still tried the fixboot command: FIXBOOT returned: FIXBOOT is writing a new boot sector. The new bootsector was successfully installed. I then rebooted without the cd. --> NTLDR is missing Press any key to restart I tried an NTLDR solution from http://www.tinyempire.com/shortnotes/files/ntldr_missing.htm. Booting off that cd gave me an error saying that windows/hal.dll is missing or damaged. !!! X_X I don't have any other computers in my house capable of connecting SATA drives. So I cannot hook it up to another computer then rewrite a boot.ini / somehow fix the NTLDR . Please help asap! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ampTK Posted February 24, 2006 Share Posted February 24, 2006 People, have you tried lilo? It works for me, i boot to SATA, and there with lilo chose whatever i what. If i boot to the IDE the Darwin bootloader doesn't give me a chose for my Win Xp or Gentoo Linux partitions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rakusuira Posted February 24, 2006 Share Posted February 24, 2006 I will try that. But, I can't even load into XP anymore EDIT: I just tried the following - copy d:\i386\ntldr c:\ copy d:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\ copied successfully, but i still get the ntldr missing error Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jbjonas Posted February 24, 2006 Author Share Posted February 24, 2006 Oh boy, here we go... I think that what you did with fixboot, was write over the MBR on your IDE drive. I'm guessing you can't even boot into OS X now. Unless that Dell CD is special, and has drivers for your SATA controller, this is what I think happened. Normal XP CDs that I have used (never had a Dell recovery disk) don't have SATA drivers, so normal booting on them into recovery console, will only see IDE drives! When booting the CD- pay close attention. There is a message at the bottom to hit F6, for 3rd party drivers. You need to hit this, and then later on it will prompt you for a floppy disk with - which you'll need to make with your SATA drivers. Dell most likely has a download that will help you make such a 'F6 disk' as some of us call it, specific to your system. Let us know how this goes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rakusuira Posted February 24, 2006 Share Posted February 24, 2006 Are you sure that it is not noticing my SATA drive? because I disconnected my IDE drive, the SATA is the only one connected. I don't see why it would be able to copy to C:/ successfully without noticing the drive. EDIT: I can boot into OS X. EDIT 2: I can take an IDE drive from another computer and have it boot in mine. Would I be able to fix it through XP from another HD? Going to unscrew them now. (I think this would be easier, and help me avoid errors from doing stuff through the XP Reinstall Disc or command prompt) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jbjonas Posted February 24, 2006 Author Share Posted February 24, 2006 ok, so if that's the case... I think that you are seeing the SATA drive. Perhaps the XP disk from dell includes your SATA driver. At this point, I'm afraid I'm not sure how to help you. There are a lot of things that could be going on. Keep us posted on your progress, and I'll help as best I can. I'm sure that other people here will have ideas to help you too. edit: also, yes, booting from another XP drive, will let you see the SATA drive (as long as you install the SATA driver in that XP system). That may help. If you get very stuck, you can boot from the XP disk, and procede as if reinstalling, but chose the option to let the installer REPAIR your XP installation on the SATA drive. This usually works pretty well, and you shouldn't lose data, like when reinstalling from scratch, but if I remember correctly you will just lose any system preferences that you configured before. (not a bad tradeoff to save your data). Just another idea if it gets too hairy for you = I know that I have had to do this more than once. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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