Question; Customer wants new hard drive and would like to keep some of the files on old hard drive. My initial thought was “No Problem, I’ll just pop out the old drive, put in the new drive, format it, install the OS and then set the old drive to “Slave”, through it back in the system and copy the file’s off. In a perfect world it probably would have worked.
Unfortunately we don’t live in a perfect world, it didn’t! The “Slave” drive was detected in the BIOS but I couldn’t see it from the Windows 98 FAT 32 partition when the system booted. If you can’t see the drive you can’t copy file’s.
So, figuring it may be a file system problem (FAT32 Can’t see a NTFS Partition) I set the drive back to Master, removed the new drive, threw the old one back in, rebooted, entered the BIOS to make sure the drive was detected (it was). Immediately after POST I get the “Error, NTLDR is missing” message. Hmmm! well let me boot from the Windows 2000 cd and repair the OS. Nope! No OS detected to repair. NOT GOOD!
Now I’m stuck, I’m thinking that the partition is corrupt, I need to know how I can check the drive to make sure the partition is set “Active” and possibly repair the MBR.
In the past I would just use the FDISK /MBR command to recreate the MBR, use SYS C: to copy the system file’s from the boot disk to the boot partition and be done with it. Windows 2000 doesn’t use the same system files so ?SYS C:? is basically useless. FDISK is useless because it?s a NTFS Partition and FDISK won?t recognize it (Right?).
What program can I use to check the drive Partition to make sure its active and repair the partition MBR if need be? Can I still use FDISK even though it?s a Windows 2000 NTFS Partition? Is there aWin 2000 tool that will give me the power I need? If so, what is it and where can I get it?
Thanks
ebcdic