Friggen NTLDR!

[Azk]

I gave my bro my old KT7A-Raid for Xmas. We put the machine together and now cannot get it to boot on the WinXP CD or the WinME boot disk that I have. Every time I start up I get an NTLDR not found error and am told to restart. The machine has 2 HDs in it. One (master) is an NTFS formated drive with random data (movies and such). The other is also NTFS (slave) and is an old install of XP that my bro used on his previous machine. I simply want to boot the XP CD or startup floppy and format the master HD so I can put on XP...What to do????? What is going on?

Tried:
HDs on the Raid controller
HDs on both channels of the standard Eide controller
Using only the master HD
Various Boot CDs (WinXP SP1, WinXP, Win98)
Boot floppy from WinME

HELP!!!!

[Azk]

Forgot to mention that I used the HD with WinXP that had been running this mobo/cpu/video card combo before it went to my brother as the primary master and the machine booted. It let me into Windows just fine by freaked out when it found all of the new HDs and CD drive and rebooted it self... :-P

[Azk]

I have discovered a way to get the system to boot from the WinXP install CD - disconnect all of the attached hard drives! Needless to say, this will now allow me to install XP as there will be no where to put it. What to do, what to do?

[Isezumi]

Okay have you considered booting into BIOS and changing your boot order to all CD-ROM so that it doesnt look at the HDD.

I have a fair idea that it wasnt booting to CD, cause it kept running into the System partition on that Slave drive. Once you took them all off, it only had the CD-ROM to choose from.

So back to what I was saying, just throw in the HDD that you want to load the OS on but make sure that you set Boot order so that it is never looking for that HDD. You should be disco from here on out.

[Azk]

Thanks for the suggestions Isezumi. I did try changing the boot order so that the HDs were not looked at but with no avail. What did work was the following though. If I disconnect the Master(no OS on this disk) and leave the Slave (w/XP) on, the CD will boot and I can get into the Setup application. So I decided to scrap my plans to install on the Master, a 20GB 7200 rpm Maxtor, and instead put in a slower 30GB Maxtor in its place. WinXP SP1 is now (almost) happily installling on the 30GB drive. Not quite what I was looking for but hey, it will get the machine running.

[Isezumi]

yeah well if it bugs you that much, you can use Ghost to put it on that 20 gig.