I need some SERIOUS help (NTLDR)

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thewretched

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Hey everyone. I'm new to the boards, but im in dire need of some help.

Let me just say thank you in advance.

to start, im running an MSI K8N Neo Plat
2x 120 gig WD HDDs in a raid

I turned on the beast this morning, and i had apparently contracted a virus somewhere. Run32dll.exe (not the real rundll32) was running in the background. 100% cpu usage by it. yuk. every time i closed it out with taskmanager, explorer would go to 100% cpu usage. ran a full system virus scan. got rid of some trojan, and then i manually deleted run32dl.exe. okay. everythings cool. reboot. still running slow, explorer still using 100% cpu. wtf? boot into safe mode and poke around a bit. everything seems fine. no viruses. no spyware. still crazy cpu usage though.

so, i pop in the windows xp cd and figure ill just do a repair on it to see what happens. PC locks up. puke:

then it all goes to hell.

i reboot without the disk in. "NTLDR missing, please restart." omfg. reboot. same thing. crap crap crap crap. i pop the windows cd back in and attempt another repair. after putting in the floppy for my raid drivers, it still doesnt recognize that i have a copy of windows installed already, so I cant do a repair. it shows my raid, and says that i cant install windows over what i already have because there isnt enough space left (even though i know for a fact that I have over 70 gigs left on the stripe). god. damn. it.

i copy over ntldr and ntdetect.com from the disk, but to no avail. ran fixboot. told me I had a corrupt boot sector and that it fixed it. still nothing. bootcfg tells me I have nothing to boot, and bootcfg /scan wont work.

i tried to chkdsk, and apparently i have a "problem beyond repair" or something to that extent.

I really dont get it. I made no changes to the BIOS. the mobo still recognizes the stripe as "healthy" and it is still set to boot. yet windows is taking a huge crap on me.

im seriously stabbing myself in the eye over here. I have A LOT of valuable data on this pc (music production stuff, as well as other junk).

Does anyone have ANY idea what I can do to get windows to at least recognize that I have an install so I can attempt a repair? i feel like ive tried everything.
 
Updates:

a dir command in the recovery console shows both ntlrd and ntdetect.com files in the sysroot. still shows only 2 megs left out of 230 gigs. logon command does nothing, so still no windows installations being detected.

also ran a western digital diagnostic from a floppy, with no errors found. almost positive its not a hardware issue.

what do I do? >.> <.<

>.<
 
Hi,

I think the best thing to do in this situation is to just reformat. Doing a system recovery might just take more time than just reformatting and starting fresh. If you're unwilling to reformat I'm sure others here can provide some assistance. I wish I could be of more help but I'm limited in my knowledge and time (at the airport).

Bsaber
 
OK, u'll need a Windows 98 installation disk & a boot disk for the same.
Download a Windows 98 boot disk floppy from here, if u don't already have it.
http://www.troyedwards.com/downloads/BootDisks/boot98.exe
Put a floppy into ur floppy drive then run the exe file that u downloaded. it will make a boot disk. Restart ur PC, change the BIOS settings to ensure that the computer tries to boot from the A: drive first by changing the boot sequence. Fire the PC up with the floppy IN THE DRIVE. It will load the command prompt in a few secs. Pop in the cd into the drive and switch to the cd-drive. Type setup to run win98 setup. Install win98(it'll take around half-an-hour) and do a clean install of windows XP over it.
Its kinda long, but it will work. Good luck :grinthumb
 
Hey, back up ur data using Win 98 first, before installing XP & keep win98 in as a backup OS on another partition of ur hard disk, if u have one.
 
im about to try it. what I think I might end up doing it just wiping the drive and starting fresh after I use 98 to burn all my data to DVD.

however, if I can get XP to run smoothly again (or at all), ill tweak/backup from there.

just popped in the boot floppy. we'll see....
 
iss said:
What you should do is make a BartPE disk that you can use to recover data from any XP machine.

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
Click to expand...

i guess its time to try this. The 98 installation didnt work. It tells me that it cannot create a temp directory, and that if NTFS is installed, a DOS partition is required :dead:

burning a PEbuilder cd right now >.>

what a pain computers are


edit:
i made a msdos partition with fdisk, and im going to retry installing 98. CD is still burning.
dear god please work
 
the Bart thing is giving me a "file nvraid.sys could not be found" error, and the win98 install is freezing at "scanning registry"

someone up there really hates me.
 
yeah. raid 0. pressed F6 when needed and put in the floppy. doesnt seem to copy the file over or something. the win98 freezes no matter what. im gunna try a win2k install. if thats a no go, im gunna have to wipe it completely.

this is a total bummer :( :(
 
I guess a complete formatting would be the best bet for u. Seems to me ur PC is really screwed. Hope it gets fixed up pretty soon.
 
with ISS' help, i was able to add the raid drivers to the PE program. everhthing loads without error. however, the file management utility still shows 2 seperate harddrives, C: and D:. C has no files on it, and D has boot files and the like. boot.ini has random jarble in it (should it?) Under bart's "stuff test", i see /physicaldrive0 which shows as 223 gigs and is type: harddisk, and D:, which shows the same and is labeled as fixed drive.

helpppppppp :)


edit: deleted the partition that i made for the win98 install. now I have one drive, C:, with 10 megs and all the boot into. bartstuff still shows a physical drive with 223 gigs, but no access to it. eep.
 
last post, i promise

alright, so I downloaded a few plugin tools for PE Builder (All the data recovery plugins)

so, my stripe is still intact. i can see it with GetDataBack and DiskExplore as the first partition on drive 1. however, the dont know how to make it boot. does anyone have advanced experience with this piece of software that could lend a hand?

i really really appreciate it, and thanks for not flaming my thread :angel:


edit:
by the way, my stripe is listed as a phyisal drive in diskexplorer. however, drive C: is listed under "logical drives" and is only 10 megs :eek:

dont really know how to change that.
 
repairing the drive to make it bootable may not be a viable option. your best bet before you do anything else is to get your data you want to save. if you have a burner on the machine you can burn the data off onto a cd or dvd. if you hav an external USB hard drive available you should be able to move the data off onto it. ( just make sure that the usb hard drive is connected BEFORE you boot the computer.
 
Woo!

I won the game.

with the use of PE Builder and UBCD4WIN (http://www.ubcd4win.com/howto.htm - an EXTREMELY useful plugin/assortment of programs for the builder), i was able to successfully wipe the boot sector and replace it, as well as replace the MBR. This was enough to get the windows recovery to detect my previous install, and i was able to repair as normal from there. chkdsk is running as we speak, fixing all the problems that i made by messing with the file system

thanks for all your help, and if you ever get stuck I would definately recommend that UBCD4WIN program. just download the full program (81 megs), point it to the pebuilder folder, and it installs everything itself.

:hotbounce
 
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