NTLDR not found, partition "magic" messed up

colly10

I was resising a partition with partition magic and got an error during it. When I rebooted the system I get the NTLDR not found message. I ran the rescue disk and moved a copy of NTLDR and ntdetect.com onto the root of the drive. I tried using fixboot and fixmbr but im still having the problem :mad:

Would anyone have any ideas how to solve it.
Thanks

Sherifu

Do you still get NTLDR not found? Or what happens now?

colly10

Yes i've been getting it since I used partition magic. Fixboot and fixmbr had no effect

Sherifu

Is it just the one drive? If you moved them onto the drive you shouldn't be still getting the error.

Ruu_Old

Try checking the BIOS settings. Restore them to default, making sure the main hard drive is set to boot first.

colly10

Ruu wrote: »

Try checking the BIOS settings. Restore them to default, making sure the main hard drive is set to boot first.

They are set to default and it's booting from the hd first, id see it as unlikely though because the issue was caused by an error when resizing the primary partition.

Sherifu wrote: »

Is it just the one drive? If you moved them onto the drive you shouldn't be still getting the error.

Ye it's just the one drive. Looking at it again it's reporting the drive to be a FAT FS, it's an NTFS so partition magic completly ****ed up the file system from the look of things, also it can't find the windows folder (it no longer exists) which is never good, time to reinstall

conceited

If you haven't already reinstalled windows gimme a shout.

colly10

conceited wrote: »

If you haven't already reinstalled windows gimme a shout.

I still havn't reinstalled. What I have now is 3 partitions. The first is the messed up windows partition and I have 2 other corrupt blank partitions which I can't install to.
I've been looking at getting my data before I reinstall so thats stopped me wiping the who thing. The problem is that even if I delete the 2 blank partitions to make one fresh one the fresh one remains corrupt so I cant reinstall to it (theres a few problems basically)

At the moment im just going to use testdisk on some bootable cd and see where that gets me

conceited

What you do is make your hard disk one big primary partition.Don't format it .And reboot.
Your vbr (volume boot record) should still be untouched and if it was messed up there is a backup one created when you formated your drive first day.It stores the backup vbr at the end of the partition. If it's ther partition table on the mbr that can also be fixed easily .

Try that anyway it's 100% not going to affect your data don't worry.

Nonmonotonic

Possible solution here also other UNIXy solutions on this site. Or try http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk or http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ for free.

Just reread my advice, you would have to run MbrFix from external boot media ( good info in the 'read about MbrFix').

colly10

Thanks everyone for the advice, just a quick update, I can access my data now to copy so going to avoid touching the partitions any more.
Currently I have the messed up windows partition (but the files are intact), tryed recreating the MBR, fixing the bootsector and installing a new bootloader all to no effect.

I got rid of the 2 other corrrupt partitions though and was able to get red hat on then. I used a bootdisk to transfer some files from the windows partition onto Linux (although its way too small to take many)

Going to buy a new HD now, install windows then transfer the files over

conceited

Glad you were able to get your files.
Anyway your partition table was more than likely messed up not your mbr.

colly10

conceited wrote: »

Anyway your partition table was more than likely messed up not your mbr.

Ye thats seems to be the problem alright

pdevo

have you got a floppy drive and blank floppy disc.try this program

http://www.tinyempire.com/notes/files/fixntldr.exe