Re: "NTLDR missing" after 5-RELEASE install

On Tuesday 25 February 2003 16:58, Andrew Boothman wrote:
> Quoting Lucas Holt <luke_at_foolishgames.com>:
> > It probably is.  You need to put in the win 2k CD and do a repair on
> > your windows install.. unfortunetely this may screw up your freebsd
> > install.
> >
> > On Tuesday, February 25, 2003, at 05:58  AM, Andrew Boothman wrote:
> > > Hi!
> > >
> > > I've just installed 5-RELEASE, and I asked for the FreeBSD Boot
> > > Manager to be installed on both my HDDs.
> > >
> > > When the machine boots I'm given options for :
> > >
> > > F1 - DOS
> > > F5 - Drive 2
> > >
> > > Hitting F5 takes me to a second menu, where I can boot FreeBSD no
> > > problem. My problem is that Win2k will no longer boot.... Hitting F1
> > > displays a message that, "NTLDR is missing". I've tried all the repair
> > >
> > > options on the Win2k setup disc to no avail I think.
> > >
> > > I'm sorry this isn't directly FreeBSD related, but I really hope my
> > > Win2k installation isn't hosed.
>
> Thanks for replying!
>
> I can't understand how the 5.x boot manager has managed to break my windows
> boot, i've never had any trouble under 3.x or 4.x, both of which played
> with windows perfectly nicely.
>
> I think i've tried all of the various repair options on the Win2k CD,
> including getting it to do a fresh installation into a different folder
> (c:\tempwin), but even that failed with the "NTLDR missing" message!
> However you no longer get the booteasy (F1.... F2) menu anymore, so Windows
> must have rewritten something. It still doesn't explain why Win2k still
> won't boot.
>
> I'm running out of ideas and I *really* don't want to have to reformat my
> windows drive!
>
> Other than this (fairly major) problem, my 5.0 installation went really
> well, even ACPI seems to be working perfectly and I even found a KLD to
> support my on- board sound card! :)
>
> I really want to get windows booting again so I can continue to play with
> 5.0 without worrying...
>
> Any help is much appricated!
>
It could well be that windows has become confused about the partition 
numbering. the important file is c:\boot.ini. It will have a line like...

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows" /fastdetect

I can't recall what all the numbers mean and IIRC documentation is slightly 
scant, but try changing the numbers, in particular the partition() part and 
see if that helps. Since you can't boot windows its not obvious how to edit 
the file, recovery console or knoppix are the two methods i would try.

Steve