I recently had 3 HDD's in my PC, and I did not have any idea what setting (slave/master) they were on. I removed one, which was connected to a CDROM drive on the same IDE cable. I then re-booted and I had the Hal.dll missing. So I did the bootcfg /rebuild, and it worked. Then I realized I had removed the wrong blank HDD, removed the blank 120GB instead of the blank 80GB. So I switched the drives, then I got the NTLDR missing, error. So I tried to copy the ntldr file from X:\i386 and the ntdetect.com to my hdd, but to no avail. (My primary windows HDD's root is D:\ so I assume when I installed windows it was on slave.) So when the above did not work I decided to set both the HDD's to Cable select, then plugged the D:\ into master, then the blank 120 into master. I then did the Fixboot, which for some reason wanted to fix the C:\ boot, presumably the blank 120. Didn't work. So I then it Bootcfg /rebuild. And the copying of ntldr and ntdetect. As well as fixboot and fix mbr. But nothing worked. Any help would be appreciated.
I fixed the above problem after some general 'fiddling'. But now for some reason, every time my PC starts, the normal gateway Intel flashes up. Then it enters some sort 'Boot Agent'. Which does this odd loading symbol. Like alternating: /|\ but really fast and alternating so it looks like a star rotating extremely fast, then after about 45 seconds, it says: No file found, Exiting boot agent. Then loads into windows normally. Obviously this is a slow down I would prefer not to have. Is there anyway I can bypass this, as it has never happened before I started the HDD replacement junk. Thanks a Million ~Pieter
That almost sounds like its trying to boot from the LAN. Check your BIOS and disable the LAN boot option and see if that takes care of it. ~Rich
