Computer Association of SIUE - Forums

OK, first the mandatory specs on my system:

Dual 400mhz (512kb cache) P2 CPUs
Intel n440bx Motherboard
Dual SCSI controllers
Dual IDE controllers (of course)
4gb HDD
ATAPI IDE CD-ROM
Onbaord Video, LAN, etc

Anyway, I have a SCSI RAID controller and IDE Promise RAID controller that I'd like to use with this system, but due to the problems that I'm having, I decided to leave them off to begin with.

The problem I (currently) have is this- right now I'm just trying to install Windows 2000 Server on an IDE drive with an IDE CD-ROM.  No fancy setup at all, I just want to boot into Windows, setup a (crummy) software RAID with another drive, then work on getting all my SCSI to work.  But, after I install Windows onto the IDE drive and reboot I get a "Cannot load NTLDR" error.  I've gone throug the install twice and get the same result.  Any ideas on what could be causing this?  I wanted to install onto the Promise IDE RAID, but it locks up after I tell it to use the (correct) drivers for the card.

Any advice is welcome.  I want to get this sucker going so I can retire my 700 Athlon from server duties and take advantage of the 14 or so hard drives I have laying around.   :-D

I recall seeing this error after deleting all of my NTFS partitions and leaving the master boot record intact.  I suspect the boot record on your system is unable to find the active partition that contains the operating system.  You should be able to use a classic command.com boot disk with fdisk.exe to determine if the correct partition is marked active.

Peter

Thanks for the help, Peter.

Turns out that it just took some kind words to decide to work for me.  Of course, now I'm left with the problem of getting the SCSI and Promise RAID to work.  Aaah well- another problem for another night, I guess.

Thanks again.