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duhvoodooman
413 Posts
0
2963
September 14th, 2005 13:00
NT Bootloader Diskette Fails
I ran into an odd problem and am wondering if anyone here can help me understand what's going on.
I keep an "NT Bootloader" floppy diskette on hand, just in case my Windows XP Pro boot files get buggered up. Just a simple floppy disk, formatted though XP, and containing the three key XP boot files: NTDETECT.COM, NTLDR, and BOOT.INI. I've used it on several occasions and know that it works.
However, I gave the original diskette to a friend recently, and made a new copy for myself. Last night, I tried booting from the diskette, just to test it, and ran into a problem. The disk appeared to work fine, but instead of XP loading, I got an error message saying that HAL.DLL was missing or corrupt. Since I know that the file is present and in perfect condition, I assumed this was just a matter of the BOOT.INI file directing the loader to the wrong drive location.
Since I had switched my boot drive from a RAID 0 array to a new SATA drive a few months back, I figured that the BOOT.INI file on the floppy was out of date. So I copied the current NTDETECT.COM, NTLDR, and BOOT.INI files from my boot drive to the diskette and tried booting from it again. No go--same error message.
It's unclear to me why the PC still can't seem to find the boot drive when the current system BOOT.INI file is present on the bootloader diskette. The only thing I can figure is that, when booting from the diskette rather than the SATA hard drive, the PC "sees" the hard drives in a different order, rendering the BOOT.INI specified location incorrect. I should mention that there is a second hard drive in the PC, located as the master on the primary IDE channel. The boot drive is located on SATA channel 3 (of 4).
Two questions:
1) Does this diagnosis make sense? If not, what is causing this behavior?
2) If my diagnosis is correct, how do I need to modify the "default" line in BOOT.INI in order to work with this drive configuration? Current entry is:
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
(Yes, I realize the [operating systems] information in the file will need to be similarly edited.)
TIA for any & all help!
Message Edited by duhvoodooman on 09-14-2005 10:59 AM
duhvoodooman
413 Posts
228
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Posted September 15th, 2005 01:00
Click on my sig!
duhvoodooman
413 Posts
228
0
Posted September 14th, 2005 22:00