I have a dell d600 laptop which i decided to upgrade the storage capacity of recently. I bought a Samsung spinstar 80gb hard drive and did everything as youd expect(formatted it in ntfs); I then wanted to see what windoiws vista is like and installed it on my new drive (crappy beta) and once i'd had my fun with that i set about moving my stuff from the previous drive; after formatting this time however the ntldr message became apparent on bootup;after a while I used Norton ghost to clone my hard drive onto this new one. Now, once again the hard drive has this problem after I formatted for a new windows installation;again ntldr is missing please reboot. I also formatted my previous drive to be a extra storage for me (both were formatted in windows from external enclosure, does this matter?) and have the same message come up when i use it in the laptop.When i try and boot through my windows cd it works but onlyif the hard drive is unconnected, and obviously the installer can only go so far without a hard drive. I know this is heavily addressed elsewhere on the net but there are so many fixes for different specific causes, and I dont know what the cause is specifically yet. I checked the hard drives on my bros machine and the same error comes up when they are used as primary boot drives so I dont think its anything machine specific rather a hard drive problem, but Im wondering about the coincidence of the two having exactly the same problem almost simultaneously (could this be due to the cloning?) I have checked both drives on a third party computer with the enclosure, reformatted them and checked for errors through storage manager in control panel; Im wondering what to do next.
Any help is appreciated
Any help is appreciated