DD11 causes failure to book (Dreaded 'NTLDR is missing/Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart' msg
I have not seen a topic headline similar to mine, so I'm making a new post. My apologies if this same topic has been referenced elsewhere.
I get he dreaded 'NTLDR is missing/Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart' message, which is all that my computer delivers to me, instead of a expected happy partition message. Following are the details....
a) I have been noticing for the past several months that my C: drive (where the Win XP SP2 (or is it SP3? Well, no matter) OS resides, is getting increasingly crowded), mainly by the OS itself, which is an incessant nag about these things.
b) decided early last week, swayed mainly by good reviews (including eldergeek.com), that the product, Disk Director 11, was the answer to my woes.
c) made the decision to commit to the product and executed it.
d) downloaded and installed product (Disk Director 11). Did _not_ burn a copy of the product to CD (trusted Acronis) manual--at least the good parts. ran the product. Some of the things I saw
1) One physical disk volume having four logical drives (C: 34 Gb, 98% full, D: 34 Gb 70% full, E: 34 Gb, 70% full, F 120+Gb, 40% full). I set these drives up when the hard drive was new, and didn't expect the C: drive to balloon in size as much as it has. (But that's why, and is the only reason, for my purchase of the product.)
2: an option to change drive size (which I definitely can't reproduce now, or I would do it and attach a screen shot).
3. I selected that option, asked for a total of 44 Gb (having no idea where your product was going to find that space, since all available space has already been allocated, but assuming that it would next ask me which drive I would like to have the space-to-be-deallocated taken from.)
4. That did not happen. In fact, no further input from me was requested. The product started merrily along and provided interesting progress bars for about ten or fifteen minutes and then asked (or perhaps told--I can't remember) me that a reboot was necessary. I agreed, of course, and off we went.
5. Up to that day, I had thought that the Blue Screen of Death was the worst thing I'd ever encountered in my thirty years of working with MS-DOS/Windows computers. I can most assuredly tell you today that the black 'NTLDR is missing Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart' screen that I now see after running your product is far more chilling. My computer will not reboot after running the DD11 product.
Has anyone seen anything like this before and/or willing to suggest a way out of this hole? It's desperation time here at the ranch, and time to circle the wagons.
First, always use the CD Rescue Disk because using DD utilities directly from the Win environment even in its rebooted setup mode can be error prone.
So far with DD11 I have failed to produce a bootable clone. I did have one success but having both the source and destination disks hot working directly within the Windows environment changed my drive letter assignments on both the original and cloned disks.
I was able to get into the disk created with the Rescue CD by creating a boot floppy (and maybe you can do this with a flash drive if you are set up for that).
All I did was do a standard floppy format. I then copied ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini (all protected hidden files) to it using the command window and the copy command as I recall. I was then able to get into the cloned volume. You can use this floppy to get these files back into your primary boot volume from the floppy.
I am working with tech support here to solve my problem but the error mesaage is different for me.
My environment is also XP SP3. I have not had any problem cloning with Migrate Easy 7 and moving/resizing partitions with DD10.1 having both of these on my Acronis CD boot utility disk.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305595 describes how to create a boot floppy when you do not have access to a good HD. In my case I had a Migrate Easy 7 cloned disk to get the files from.
On the MS support site you can also check on the articles on using the Recovery Console from your XP install to restore missing boot sequence files by copying them from your Install CD to your HD volume. These are last resort rescue tactics.
The best protection is a good cloned HD.
For what it is worth my hds sit in cartridges that fit into nests in the 5.25 slots in my minitower. This makes it easy to swap disks around for cloning and recovery on a disk failure. My drives are SATA but these type of fittings are available in PATA/IDE as well.
The best backup before modifying an HD is a true clone where all folder serial numbers, drive signatures, etc. are copied across to the clone without partition resizing to keep copy protection schemes intact.