NTLDR missing?

S

soaringthor

Member
Oh boy.... where do I start....
Old drive:
<Dell Recovery ( R: )><Vista( C: )><XP( E: )[Ubuntu + Swap]
<> = simple partition
[] = extended partition
New drive:
<Vista( R: )><Unallocated><XP( C: )>[Ubuntu+Swap]

So two problems....
1) Drive letters have changed. Whoops! Good bye EasyBCD! And I'm hoping it didn't actually change the drive letters, cause XP really won't like that!
2) No matter what I do in EasyBCD, XP says that ntldr is missing or corrupt. Sometimes it's Vista's bootloader, sometimes it's an XP screen. I haven't done any recovery stuff on XP's side yet: I wanted to get your opinion first.
What can I do???

3) (but i don't care, cause i'll reinstall) Vista doesn't want to load properly, even after two startup repairs. It comes up with a couple of windows core programs that failed to start, then loads me into a temporary profile.

(Oh, BTW, I'm posting from my Ubuntu.)

Addendum:

oh... n00b mistake.
Edited boot.ini, and was able to at least boot XP. Now, it's a problem of those drive letters.....
 
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The drive letters that will count will be those seen in Vista's own Disk Management tool for how things run for Vista. The same is true when booting up into XP where any changes in the DM will effect programs installed on that version if you custom installed to a different partition or drive or ran an installer from a particular drive letter like now seeing the D for optical drive changed to E or F and some run from cd game or program sees an error message when failing to load.

If you reinstall Vista that will see XP added in automatically since that is the older version of Windows with the newer then seeing a fresh install. If you presently are running XP on a separate drive the fresh copy of Vista will see a different drive letter assigned by shifting the optical from D to E with XP as the D drive. Ubuntu would be the one then needing to be reconfigured all over again.
 
Hmmmm....
Well everyone knows you can't just change drive letters at whim, especially the system drive. So I went into the registry (to HKLM>System>Mounted Devices) and played around in there, and got my Vista back. But I can't with XP, because i can't get into the registry. I tried restoring from a hive backup, but that didn't work. Safe mode and LKGC didn't work either. I can't repair the OS, because Setup doesn't even detect the fact that XP is already installed. Is there any way I can change the drive letters back for XP? How did these get changed in the first place??
(if this isn't the right place for this, feel free to move it to a different support forum)
 
Both XP and Vista want to use the C: drive as the system drive. They both will as well depending on how you install them. With installing from teh CD/DVD they will both take the C: drive as their system drive which will make the drive layout be different when under the other OS. This is normal behaviour.

That is what i think you are talking about. The drive letter for XP is not as important as it is knowing which is the boot drive and having all the boot info for both XP and Vista on there.
 
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