I have a friend who has a Dell 8400 (yes they are still a friend after admitting this to me 😉 ).
They called the other to see if I could help them. They had the famous “missing NTDLR” message.
They said it was on one disk so I told them to bring it over so I could extract the files. They actually brought over 2 250 Gig disks, and said that it was all on the C partition with 460 odd gigs of storage. RAID 0!
I placed the drives back into the system and no matter which way I put them in I got the RAID setup during boot saying that it the RAID volume was healthy, but there is a red message saying “error occurred(0)”. I am assuming a hard drive issue or a virus.
Knoppix is no use and does not recognise the C drive, and Ubuntu live CD see’s the drive, but it appears that there is severe corruption, as you can see files and directory names, but they names are gibberish symbols.
I did boot using a WinXP SP2 disk (with the RAID driver) into the recovery console. I then ran “fixboot C:” and “fixmbr C:”, and also copied the CD’s D:\i386\ntldr, and nD:\i386\tdetect.com files to the C: drive. This did not work.
Anything else I can try? Any recovery software that can boot from a flash drive or CD and rescue the partion and its data?
I have not yet tried to use the Windows XP install CD to repair the system as I’m afraid it will lose the partition data permanently (I know it won’t format the drive).
Any advice will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.