How to Recover a Primary Boot Partition

archp2008 · 27 May 2009

Hello,

I have Windows XP64 and XP 2005 installed on adjacent partitions on an 80 GB IDE hard drive. I had been accustomed to using BIOS to choose the drive and EasyBCD to choose the OS. A few days ago I was unable to boot into this drive because I kept getting the error "NTLDR missing (press Ctrl-Alt-Del)." I tried using Microsoft's BCSetup2 (I think that's what it's called) but couldn't get a floppy disk to boot. Being that there wasn't much on this hard drive, other than the Windows OS's, I decided to reinstall the Win64 on the first partition. I find now that EasyBCD does not install on my XP64, so evidently I must have had it installed on the XP MCE partition. I'm wondering now how I can go about accessing the MCE on that other partition, or finding or remaking the boot loader. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks in advance for any comments.

SIW2 · 27 May 2009

Hi Arch,

Easybcd should install on 7.

Please post a screenshot of Disk Management, like this:

How to Recover a Primary Boot Partition-diskmanagement2009-02-04_031947.jpg

and of the bcd entries - type cmd in start search - when it pops up, RT click and run as admin.

Type:

bcdedit {enter}

How to Recover a Primary Boot Partition-bcdedit2009-03-07_235226.jpg

archp2008 · 27 May 2009

Thanks for the reply. I have 3 SATA drives in addition to the one IDE drive in question. I can boot into the XP64 on the IDE drive. This is where the Disk Management screen capture is from. It shows the IDE drive on the top. Windows 7 (test copy) is on a small partition on one SATA drive 3 that I am using mainly for backups and movies. I couldn't see the IDE drive in disk management from the main XP partion on Disk 1, which I use most of the time - only the 3 SATA drives. I'm not sure why. When I found bcedit (only found on Vista64) from this partition (XP64) and ran as admin I got the error shown (screen capture posted). (BTW I originally installed the Operating Systems on the IDE drive with the SATA drives disconnected, so I reinstalled the XP64 in the same way. I don't trust Windows for overwriting MBR's)

archp2008 · 28 May 2009

I made some blunders today that set me back further on my efforts to get these two operating systems dual booting on that IDE drive again. I decided to format the drive and use it for storage for home videos and personal photos. I have the two operating systems on cd's, so, in the unlikely event that I really need either of them I have the capability of reinstalling them in the future. I find it annoying that Microsoft Windows still has so many hundreds of things wrong with it, despite the hundreds of updates which force the user to install them in stage after stage after stage taking hours and hours. Too bad Linux is so technical. Anyway, thanks again for your reply.