XP won't boot...

[8bit]

Hi folks...

I started my PC tonight and got the usual Vista boot option screen (left over from an old install of Vista RC1). It defaults to booting "Earlier version of Windows", in my case XP x64. once the 5 second timeout happened the Vista bootloader told me it couldn't book XP x64 because NTLDR was missing.

I installed Vista RC1 on a spare partition and checked the contents of the XP64 boot partition. Funnily enough, NTLDR had been renamed NTLDR_BAK. I renamed it back the way it was and restarted. This time the Vista boot loader let me choose the "Earlier version of Windows" option and NTLDR presented the XP boot selection screen (I have a second instance of the entry for XP64 in boot.ini with the safe mode switches so I get to choose at boot time).

The problem now is that XP still won't boot, saying that NTOSKRNL.EXE is missing or corrupt. I went back into Vista, checked that NTOSKRNL.EXE exists (it did), backed it up and copied a fresh one from <winroot>\system32\dllcache and restarted. Same story, apparently it's missing or corrupt.

Any ideas? Don't really fancy doing another XP install at the moment, takes ages to get everything set up how I like it

Thanks in advance
8

[pmanington]

Try using the xp repair console? Does that come with xp 64?

[8bit]

It does, yes. I should have said that the reason I didn't try this at first was because I didn't have a floppy disk with drivers for my SATA controller, so the recovery console (and XP setup) couldn't see my disks.

I got it working in the end. Turned out that the NTLDR_BAK was in fact a very old version of NTLDR, dated some time in 2001. Possibly left over from an old XP x86 install. No idea what deleted my x64 version. I twigged when I remembered installing a 32bit XP once on another partition after installing XP64. The NTLDR on the C drive (where XP64 is) gets overwritten with a 32bit version since installing a second instance of Windows on, say the D drive, still requires the boot files to be on C. In that case, the 32bit NTLDR can't start the 64bit NTOSKRNL.EXE so it claims it's missing or corrupt.

Copied NTLDR back from my XP64 CD and all is well, phew!