I have a homebuilt machine (e6600 cpu, Gigabyte GA-954P-S3, 4 gig RAM, two 250 gig SATA HD's on RAID-1, two other 300 gig HD's on IDE). Last night I was using remote desktop to this machine from home, the connection broke and I couldn't get back on. This morning the machine was running but nothing was on the screen. Not knowing if it was the KVM or something, I rebooted and first error was from the RAID (on board) that there was an error (when I later went into setup for that it was something about Members(HDDx)). THe machine kept going past this until NTDRL was missing.
Of all the searching I did on this error, most came about upgrading/installing and that kind of stuff. This, however, was a system that worked fine yesterday and with no changes didn't work today (but I understand there WAS a Windows update last night)
None of my searches turned up anything with RAID and NTDRL -- I know they are different things, but I didn't know what to try because I do have the RAID.
If I unplugged either drive and tried to start the machine, it got past the NTDRL error and Windows screen came up, then the screen went blank prior to the sign-on screen.
I figured my first step would be to fix the RAID problem. In the RAID setup I selected to fix the problem (sorry I can't recall the exact wording), selected the drive (it was selected for me at the bottom of the screen RDD0), then it gave me a choice of which drive to use and the other drive would have all the data destroyed. Sorry I can't be more specific here, but this was all new and I didn't write it down exactly. After this finished it said to rebuild the mirror, which I did.
Now there are no RAID errors and I don't get the NTDRL error, but the machine won't go anywhere and I get a message that I some windows system files are missing or corrupt and I need to put in the install disk and type r to get the repair console:
Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM
I did that and just got a C: prompt. Typing Dir or C: just gives and error that there might be an unrecoverable error on the drive.
At this point I removed both the IDE drives, tried them on another machine in an external case, and both appear fine.
A search on this problem got to a MS knowledge base article that it might be a registry problem http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545. I can't follow through on that article because when I try and type anything at the cmd prompt, I get access denied.
Next I put a Knoppix disk in and could see the three partitions on each of the two RAID drives. It appears all the stuff is still there.
Now I'm stuck on what to do next. Any suggestions?
Of all the searching I did on this error, most came about upgrading/installing and that kind of stuff. This, however, was a system that worked fine yesterday and with no changes didn't work today (but I understand there WAS a Windows update last night)
None of my searches turned up anything with RAID and NTDRL -- I know they are different things, but I didn't know what to try because I do have the RAID.
If I unplugged either drive and tried to start the machine, it got past the NTDRL error and Windows screen came up, then the screen went blank prior to the sign-on screen.
I figured my first step would be to fix the RAID problem. In the RAID setup I selected to fix the problem (sorry I can't recall the exact wording), selected the drive (it was selected for me at the bottom of the screen RDD0), then it gave me a choice of which drive to use and the other drive would have all the data destroyed. Sorry I can't be more specific here, but this was all new and I didn't write it down exactly. After this finished it said to rebuild the mirror, which I did.
Now there are no RAID errors and I don't get the NTDRL error, but the machine won't go anywhere and I get a message that I some windows system files are missing or corrupt and I need to put in the install disk and type r to get the repair console:
Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM
I did that and just got a C: prompt. Typing Dir or C: just gives and error that there might be an unrecoverable error on the drive.
At this point I removed both the IDE drives, tried them on another machine in an external case, and both appear fine.
A search on this problem got to a MS knowledge base article that it might be a registry problem http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545. I can't follow through on that article because when I try and type anything at the cmd prompt, I get access denied.
Next I put a Knoppix disk in and could see the three partitions on each of the two RAID drives. It appears all the stuff is still there.
Now I'm stuck on what to do next. Any suggestions?