Dit vond ik maar ben er niet wijzer van geworden.BcUpdate2 to fix Ntldr missing at Boot
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BcUpdate2 to fix Ntldr missing at Boot
Tuesday, November 15, 2005 at 9:17 am
Posted by Mandy Whalen (81 messages posted)
This morning, when I tried to boot WinXP Home (updated with all patches through Nov-6-2005),
I got the dread message "ntldr missing. press ctl-alt-del to restart".
Using a different computer to surf the net, I was able to find out how to fix this
from sites other than annoyances.org. (N.B: I couldn't figure out how to use the
annoyances "Search Forum" feature properly. Although search turned up a lot of references
for "ntldr missing", when I clicked on several of the selections in the list, none
took me to a particular message, but rather a page of message headings, and none
of them seemed to correspond to the selection I'd clicked on.)
Anyhow, the problem seemed to be most likely a corrupted or missing files needed
for boot, and these four steps executed by booting from the WinXP CD-ROM and running
the System Recovery Console seemed to do the trick:
[1] FixMBR
[2] FixBoot
[3] copy g:\i386\ntldr c:\
[4] copy g:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\
After I booted succesfully into WinXP, I relaxed a little bit, but was still concerned
that if I didn't understand what caused the problem in the first place, I had no
comfort that it wouldn't recur again. Therefore, I continued researching till I found
this page in the Microsoft KnowledgeBase:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;320397
Based on reading this, I THINK the explanation is that:
-- Under certain circumstances, under early versions of WinXP (and other operating
systems using NTFS), if a lot of files get written to the root directory of the boot
drive, it's possible that the entry for NTLDR gets shifted out of the primary index
record for the root directory, and therefore it won't be recognized during boot.
-- To quote Microsoft "If you install the Windows XP service pack, you will not
resolve problems with an existing volume. You must run the [BcUpdate2] utility to
update the bootcode separately. The service pack will only write the correct bootcode
for new volumes."
When I followed the links to find out how to acquire the BcUpdate2 utility, it seems
like I would have to pay Microsoft $35 an hour to get it. It seems outrageous that
they want to charge me for fixing what seems like a seriously defective product:
-- What competent programmer would design a boot methodology so fragile that it could
be destroyed if a user happens to copy a lot of files to the root directory of the
boot drive (which is VERY easy to do by mistake)?
-- What non-malicious person would design SP2 to fix the boot problem only on new
volumes, leaving the vast majority of the volumes on which the SP2 patch was installed
still vulnerable?
Am I misunderstanding something? If not, is there any way I can download the BcUpdate2
utility without paying Microsoft an arm and a leg to do so?
Does anybody have any experience with and/or further advice about this problem?
Thanks for any help you can offer.
......mandy
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