benpjones

1 SATA Seagate 300 GB C drive with Windows XP.
3 SATA Seagate 300GB drives Raid 0 as D drive.
The raid is onboard motherboard, not a card. Motherboard is ASUS M2n-sli deluxe.
1 Floppy Drive
2 DVDRom Drives.

So I had a power outage while my computer was running. I was running my system on a surge protector so I don't think anything got fried. I tried to restart but I got a "ntldr is not found" error.

So I went out and bought new RAM and put it in. Same error.

So I put in my windows xp disk and attempted to use repair consol. But as soon as it got through setting up the loading files I got the blue screen saying there was a serious error and if this is the fist time I’ve seen this screen, run disk check.

I was able to get back into windows using my xp disk as a boot disk. All my hardware was intact and I could still access the drives. I decided to run check disk. I scheduled it and restarted the computer. Check disk found some corrupt files that it placed into a tmp file and it looked like it deleted it.

I took the windows xp disk out and restarted the computer. This time I got an error saying my hal.dll file is missing and that I need to replace it. So I put the windows xp disk back in and it restarted it safe mode. I went into the system 32 folder and changed the name of the “hal.dll” file to “old.dll” and took a new one off the windows xp cdrom.

After I restarted it all went to hell. My computer was trying to register all the hardware and nothing worked. All the drivers needed to be reassigned. And now It says I have Two Floppy drives even though I only have one. Even if I uninstall one of the floppies, it still tries to install it again as a floppy.

So I went back to the system 32 folder and changed the old.dll back to hal.dll and restarted the computer. It was all still crazy. And my D drive only listed one unallocated drive with 2 others not assigned. When I restart, the Bios setup shows that I still have one healthy Raid 0 with 900GB still allocated.

So I decided to use my system restore. Except my restore backups no longer existed. It only had one restore file showing the time of after I changed the hal.dll file.

So I spent a couple hours trying to re-assign the drivers only to find that some of them still remain with a yellow exclamation in the device manager. None of my usb ports will work.

I’ve done virus scans… but found nothing. And every time I try to re-install or repair windows it crashes to the blue screen of death. So I decided to buy a new SATA C drive and try put windows on that new drive. Except… It still says my NTLDR file is missing. Even on a new new drive. I’m thinking of updating my bios, or resetting the jumper on the board, but I’m afraid it will wipe my precious raid. Anyone know what I should do next?

benpjones

Ok... I reset my motherboard. Pulled the battery and reset the jumper. Then I found a program on a site called myntldrismissing.com. It made boot disk that reset the boot.ini file. I had to go in and manually change the settings back to how I wanted it, but now it boots without the missing ntldr message. Also, after resetting the board, I got the usb stuff working. My firewire is still yellow "!" in the divice manager, but at least I solved two more problems. I still cannot run my windows xp disk. It gets through loading the files but crashes before setup. I get a blue screen that says I should run check disk because of a serious internal errror. I run check disk... but nothing is found.

I still have my raid intact in the nvidia raid config, but windows still lists that drives as unallocated and seperate drives. So... What is missing?

sdebauers

I have had this problem too. I did a search and came up with a number of hits. MS may have had an answer in their database. As I remember the NTLDR stood for NT loader. I found a solution through one of the search answers that worked part of the way. As I rember I copied NTLDR off the windows disc onto a floppy. I put it in the A drive then booted. Make sure the A drive is listed as first drive in bios. It will allow windows to LOAD . I got tired of trying to copy it to my OS and just left it in the A drive.

You might want to check your bios to make sure the raid drive is still listed as your first drive. My bios has a habit of losing track of which drive is first whenever it crashes. It will try to boot one of my reg drives instead of the RAID. The reg drives will not allow windows to boot.

benpjones

Here is an update. I decided to try to convert all the disk in the array to dynamic since the disk wizard popped up to see if it could be that simple. I am risking loosing the data but tried it anyway.

Disk 0 | C: 298.08 GB NTFS Healthy (system) < running OS
Basic

Disk 1 | D: 298.08 GB Healthy < this is the first disk in raid 0.
Basic

Disk 2 | 298.09 GB Unallocated < this is the second disk in raid 0.
Basic <- I converted it to basic

Disk 3 | 298.09 GB Unallocated < this is the third disk in raid 0.
Basic <- I converted it to basic

After converting disk 2 and 3 to basic, I then tried to convert them together into dynamic. Disk 2 and 3 converted ok. But Disk 1 gave me this error that I can't find anywhere on the internet "the specified field is not valid". Disk 2 and 3 converted to dynamic. But I can't get disk 1 to join in. Can anyone tell if there is a way to do that?

benpjones

Hmmm! I'm tempted to delete the partition on D: maybe it is being write cashed and can't convert while active. If I delete the partition perhaps that will set it back to unallocated.

benpjones

I deleted the partition on D: and converted it to a dynamic disk along with 2 and 3. I guess i'm creating a software raid when I tried to add them together (right click) create dynamic disk. Nothing. Nothing happened. Now all three of the raid drives are listed as unallocated and there is no D drive. I restarted and found I had to go into the nvidia raid hardware set up and reassign the drives there. Back in windows, it still lists three seperate unallocated dynamic drives. I'll keep looking.

benpjones

And yes... my nvidia raid is setup in bios.

Tedmouse

had the same problem once
did something so diffrent

got a old pentium 1 stuck in the harddrive used scandisk fixed bad sectors
but not enough memory to finsh it while useing xp recover disk

then stuck harddrive in a hp computer then put the recover disk in the cd rom then started up repartitioned the harddrive then installed xp professional lost everything but got brought back the harddrive

the original computer could not fix its self so i had to use other pcs to fix what it could not
sad but true...but my 300 gb harddrive works again

benpjones

That sounds like a good idea. Sadly I don't have another computer with SATA.

benpjones

Do you guys think that when I converted the disks (in windows) to dynamic that I erased the data on the disks?

benpjones

The power outage corrupted my bios somehow. I tried to update them after extensive trouble shooting all the hardware and software. The update failed every time at 67%. I had to have my board RMAd.