Hard drive & NTLDR

[Arsenal1]

Heres' the story:

Just got more memory and a new hard drive today. Memory installed fine. Partitioned the new Western digital raptor hard drive and formatted it. Installed FEAR on it it and the game loaded and played fine... for a while. I was beginning a new level and it was loading and suddenly the computer just restarted. I checked the temperatures to see if the graphics card had got too hot and rstarted and it seemed to be fine. The game actually was playing very quiet. After it restarted everything was fine.

So, I right clicked on the new drive that restarted and I went to the tools tab and under error checking clicked on "check now," and I checked off both boxes. It wanted me to restart and so I did.

Next, it boots up but only makes it past the screen where it says BIOS options. "NTLDR is missing - Press ctrl+alt+del to restart" I do so and it keeps rebooting and doing the same thing over and over.

This new hard drive was/is only for gaming. I've already got a hard drive with Windows XP on it. Earlier it was working fine and now I don't know WTH is happening with it.

I unplugged the new WD hard drive and windows booted up normally but it keeps going to the blasted black screen of death when I plug the new one back up.

 

[Jamxx]

http://www.killdisk.com/

Run this program on your new HDD, it should completely reformat it. I think that this will solve the problem, but I can't be sure. I definitely don't want to mess anything up, but I don't see how this could do anything. It will take a while to reformat your hard drive, but I have a dedicated floppy disk (I hope you have one on your computer, you should always have one!) for it. I've used it many times on old computers that I fix up and it has always resulted in the positive.

I believe you can make an ISO image for a CD with this too, so if you don't have a floppy, burn a CD of it and set your CD drive as the top priority in the BIOS.

This should work before you get the "black screen of death" (I thought it was blue! ) and then you can work from there.

 

[BigLu]

Check the mobo tray, it could be shorting, The new memory could be causing the stop error. Also, if you have the computer overclocked, the higher clock could be deleting windows registry values. Try going back to stock speeds, check mobo tray, reformat, and a memory swap, if nothing helps, RMA the hard drive.

 

[Arsenal1]

Thanks for the replies-

Well, I stayed up to almost 2 am trying to find a solution. I'm obviously no computer guru but it seems as if the computer is wanting the new hard drive(which doesn't have windows) to start up before the first one does.

So, my temporary solution seems to go into the BIOS and select the bottom option that says display boot menu, and on the next screen push enter on the regular hard drive. This immediately boots it up first and everything works find as it makes its way to the desktop.

Its temporary but it works and I don't have to erase or send anything back. Its annoying that I have to sit there and baby it but I had to do that before as well as Windows would always ask me to load windows regulary or load the bootscreen or it would automatically do it in 30 seconds...

 

[Jamxx]

Have you configured your hard drive jumpers? If you haven't changed the jumpers around at all, you might want to look at them (on both hard drives) to see if they may be wrong. From what you have said, it sounds like this could be a problem.

 

[Arsenal1]

This might be a little late, but all I had to do was to switch the cables from the hard drive s that went on the mobo so that they were switched. This ensured that the comp would read off of the windows XP hard drive first instead of the new HDD that didn't have XP.

 

[pinky4life623]

u should put xp on the raptor it makes a huge difference