Expert: Michael Tedeschi - 10/28/2009

Question
Hello !

I wonder whether you can help me.

1.Problem:

I have two pysical Hard Drives .  We will call them Drive A and B.
On  drive  A,   my XP Home Ed. was becoming extremely sluggish. So  I decided to have  fresh XP installed.   In order to avoid any future hassles of having to reinstall ALL the programs each time , I  installed a fresh XP on  the other H.D. ( B)  , loaded ALL the programs and then created a Drive Image on an external USB drive by using Norton Ghost 14..
I subsequently tried to recover this  Drive Image on  the other drive ( A) by using the Recovery feature of Norton Ghost. And here is the problem: although the drive image  has been successfully created on the USB drive and the Recovery process on drive A has been equally successfully completed, drive A  doesn’t boot.
I get a message “ NTLDR Missing” . During other attempts to solve the problem, I have also got other messages , such as” hal.dll file missing”  and/or” corrupt ohci1394.sys”.
I  created another Image of with Acronis, but I got the same problem.: drive A simply refuses to boot, even though I can see the data of the new XP in it.

2.What I have done to solve  the problem

a.
Attempted to do a Repair with the XP installation disc ( copy). This is the same disc I had successfully used to install XP on  drive B, yet when I use it on drive A to access the Recovery Console, the Setup stops after a few moments, with the message ” ohci1394.sys file missing or corrupt.” On another attempt, I have been able to get into the R ( Repair) stage, but when I am at the Dos prompt and I type the number corresponding to the drive to repair( there is only one) the repair process stops and I am prompted to exit Setup.
I have also tried, in despair, to use   an older ( non bootable) XP Cd  in conjunction with the 6 floppies,( which has always worked) . As far as I know, I should  ignore the first Repair option and choose the “ install XP “ option first. This should  lead to a 2nd Repair prompt. Well, there is no such a a 2nd Repair prompt and if I choose the first one , I can’t continue because I  am prompted to use the ADMINISTRATOR’s password and I never had one in the first place!

b
D/loaded a small “ NTLDR FIX “ utility  and put it on a floppy. It doesn’t work.

Can you help me, please ?

Thank you

Franco


Answer
Hello

I would try a repair installation....this is different than the repair you already tried.  Keep only the A drive in the machine and disconnect any other hard drive...

Follow this walkthrough

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

Let me know how it goes.

Good Luck
-Mike