Ack! Win2k pro installation failing! help!
 

I just put together a new system and was installing win2k pro on a fresh hdd. Everything in this system is brand new -- just built it tonight.

When the win2k installation cd boots, I get this error message:
"NTLDR is missing, press ctrl-alt-del"

I can't get the installation cd to install anything! It gets stuck on this ntldr file ... which, by the way, is in the D:\i386 directory with the rest of its buddies.

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I don't have a 3.5" floppy drive installed in this system, nor do I have access to one.
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My Asus bios is current. I just checked on that. So, the MS support solutions are worthless, as usual.

How far do you get in the setup ?

Is this while trying to boot off of a cd ?
- If so, double check your bios, make sure you're specifying the cdrom as one of the first boot devices.

There are more questions, but we'll leave it at this for now.

This is after it says "Booting from cd-rom" in dos-like script. (Right below and after the resources screen)

bios is setup for cdrom as first boot device, hdd0 next and hdd1 (doesn't exist) as third.

Pretty much every single solution i've ever seen, or found for this revolves around you needing a boot disk.

I still find it foolish that people dont buy them, thier less then 10$...


Otherwise, try the REPAIR feature on the install cd, or copy the nt loader off the cd if possible.

This is prior to installation of any kind.

As the CD first attempts to load the Win2k pro installation program, I get this error message. I actually never see the "press any key to boot from CD..." so I guess the error occurs before it gets that far.

I've seen that prompt on xp installs, but haven't seen it with this install of win2k.

Is this a burned install cd ? Or something similiar ?

It just doesn't make sense that it wouldn't load into setup. Especially if it finds the cd. I know this isn't helping you any, but what you're describing just isn't adding up.

You know, this may sound nuts, but is it possible that you have a bad stick of memory ? I've seen bad memory cause all kinds of really strange errors. Just a thought.

Yeah I was thinking the same thing Mephex, for that error to occur, the Os would have needed to been partially insatlled and written to the mbr saying it exist.

I would simply try REformatting the drive, remaking the partions and everything.

Making sure you set the thing to be the primary logical partition.

Could the maxtor utility have anything to do with this? I selected NTFS/Win2k from the menu as it was "installing the hdd" ...

edit: I'm gonna go into the utility now and tell you what I'm seeing.

Its possible. The bootup screen displays the correct amount, but it could be. I have a copy of redhat that I could install to test that hypothesis...

Yes, if its formating the drive to be a non-logical drive, then the NTLDR NT Logical DRive would fail, why it fails that early... I dont know.

Thus why you should never trust anything but FDISK.. but you dont have a floppy.. sooo have fun getting this one working ;P

If possible make a bootable boot CD rom with system drivers.

The maxblast utility was used about 3-4 years ago when old motherboards couldn't support drives over a certain size. With recent hardware, you shouldn't need to use it.

But if you did that, then that tells me you do have a floppy drive ?

If so, just create the 4 boot disks and go from there perhaps ?

Mephex, my most recent harddrive purchase came with a CD utlity for hardrive setup, the world is going stupid and not using floppy's.

I'm going in and reformating to FAT32 with a 32kb cluster size on the entire 82.9Gb volume.

Just noticed that my CDROM is the primary master and hdd is the secondary master... but I don't suppose that matters.

You'll want to flip that around, so the CD is secondary master.

How much does that really matter?

edit: Did it. Not sure if that's gonna make any difference... trying everything again.

More then you'd think, it expects the harddrive to be there, and if it doesnt see one, it will not be happy.

Not like its a hard think fix anyways...

Generally its always a good move to just never put cdroms on the same ide cable as your primary harddrives. Less chance of it doing somthing wrong.

Still no joy on the boot after the cdrom/hdd ide cable swap.

Its rejecting a windows 98 cd that I know works from previous usage. This sucks.

Hmm, I noticed you said that you just built the system tonight -- have you been able to install any OS successfully? I guess what I am suggesting is the possibility that this has to do with your system components/setup rather than the 2k or 98 discs... Read probs with the drive or stuff like that, bad components... Especially if you just put the thing together, I'd also take a look at the memory combs like someone suggested; while it reports the correct amount of memory that is no guarantee there isn't a problem...try yanking them out and putting back in, or switching places if you have more than one comb in.

http://www.bootdisk.com

Hope that helps!

the last time i got the ntloader error during an install, it was because the cd drive was older and for some reason, couldn't read burned cd's.

the only solution i found was to upgrade the cd drive.

I've had tons of NT Loader errors, can never seem to find one fix for it. Try this:

http://www.onlinepcfix.com/NTLDR1.htm

Good point. The cd drive is dated 11/99 so it altogether possible that it can't read these cd's ... I got my first 4x4x12 cdrw drive that year @ $120.

Looks like I'm stuck with purchasing a floppy drive I'm only going to use once...

I hate 3.5" floppies...

Yeah floppies are useless... until this stuff happens

just go out and buy a new cdrom drive. spending 30 bucks is better than having to deal with floppies IMHO. besides, if the drive won't read burned discs, how much fun is that going to be???

here's one on newegg : <a href="http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=27-106-815&catalog=5&depa=1" target="_blank">for $30</a>

Got it running ... I ripped a ghetto 3.5" floppy drive without a face plate out of a really old Dell Dimension and temporarily hooked it up to the new system.

From there, I still couldn't install win2k, but I did manage a win98 install. From the win98 installation, I launched the win2k pro install, which formated to ntfs and completed successfully. Man, what a pain!