NTLDR is missing when a particular aux drive is connected

R

Robert P

Member
I have two system drives - A & B, both running XP Pro SP3. B is an IDE drive and is used for gaming. A is a SATA drive and I use it for Audio/Video production and internet.

If I switch from B to A, I find that I get an NTLDR is missing error on the first attempt to boot when a particular SATA non-system auxiliary drive is attached.

If I turn off the PSU, disconnect that particular aux drive, boot, shut down, then I can reconnect that problem aux drive, boot again and all is well. This happens consistently. Wondering why it always chokes on that first attempt with that particular aux drive attached.
 
The system is probably trying to boot to that drive and it can't because there is no bootloader. Check the bios for the correct hard drive to boot from.
 
johnb35 said:
The system is probably trying to boot to that drive and it can't because there is no bootloader. Check the bios for the correct hard drive to boot from.
Click to expand...
Why would it try to boot from a drive that doesn't have an o/s on it when there's a drive that has an o/s on it?
 
Only if there is no active partition on the drive, will the bios continue to the next drive in the boot order.
 
No, it most certainly can not. The only time it will skip a drive is if there are no partitions on the drive. If there is a NTFS partition on the drive, the tagged area will tell the computer "hey, I'm NTFS here" and the computer will try to boot. With no bootloader, like on a data disk, then you get the missing NTLDR message.

Does the same thing for EXT drives, just with a different error message.
 
wolfeking said:
No, it most certainly can not. The only time it will skip a drive is if there are no partitions on the drive. If there is a NTFS partition on the drive, the tagged area will tell the computer "hey, I'm NTFS here" and the computer will try to boot. With no bootloader, like on a data disk, then you get the missing NTLDR message.
Click to expand...

To be more precise, only if there is an active primary partition. If the bootstrap code in the mbr doesn't find an active partition (standard windows mbr), the mbr will hand the boot process back to bios and it will try the next disk.
 
larsch said:
To be more precise, only if there is an active primary partition. If the bootstrap code in the mbr doesn't find an active partition (standard windows mbr), the mbr will hand the boot process back to bios and it will try the next disk.
Click to expand...

This doesn't make sense. It only happens with this particular drive attached after switching to system drive A coming off a session with system drive B - and it doesn't happen with several other aux drives attached - and as previously noted, if I boot once without that particular aux drive in place, shut down, reattach it and reboot it works fine.
 
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