I was going to ask if you installed windows before or after you installed linux. if your setup was as follows windows was orginally setup on the master hard drive and then you installed a new hard drive or moved an existing hard drive to be master, then your ntldr will no longer work.

The ntldr for windows is written when windows is originally installed so that when booting it knows which hard drive and which partition to find windows. So if you re-arranged your hard drives from the original setup and then installed linux, then you screwed up windows.

If you haven't gotten very far in to setting up linux, set your hard drives back up in their original master/slave order and then re-install linux after you have had a successful boot in to windows.

When you get your hard drives setup correctly and are booting in to windows correctly, boot up to do a dos prompt using a windows 98/95/ME boot disc. At the command prompt, type "fdisk /mbr". That will clear your master boot record and overwrite any changes grub or lilo made.

Reboot and verify you get in to windows successfully. Once you do that, reboot and do a fresh install of linux.

I have been through what you are going through and really, this is best and easiest way to do it. And as a newbie, you should probably get used to re-installing linux. You'll screw it up again. But that's part of the fun of learning. Everytime I've re-installed I have learned about 10 new things in linux. And I have re-installing down to a 30 minute job that I don't even have to be present for

Hope this long winded reply makes some sense and helps

alas, i hav screwed myself over again.

i tried out the "fixmbr" and "fixboot" commands in the Windows Rescue mode to see if Windows might be able to load, but instead, it just doesn't bother to load GRUB anymore and goes straight to the "NTLDR is compressed" message. after this, i tried to copy the "ntldr" file from the Win2k installation CD to my C:, but instead the message changed back to "NTLDR is missing".

so now, i can boot from neither Windows or Linux (i'm pretty sure i can boot to Linux w/the Fedora CD, but i haven't bothered trying yet.. kinda frustrated). i'm on our second machine to try and find a solution.

i was a lil confused w/jjustin01's advice.. do u want me to set the linux HD as a slave to the windows HD?
so far, the way i have it is this:
Primary Master - Windows HD
Primary Slave - CD ROM
Secondary Master - Linux HD
Secondary Slave - CD ROM

Looks like you want to make a boot floppy for your Linux system, confirm it works...
That was an important step. Confirming the CD worked would be as good.

Perhaps the expand command will work?
http://www.pctechnicians.ca/help/w2ktips.html#12

And a post with the same problem (but on XP),
http://www.tek-tips.com/gviewthread....779/qid/751290

It's not clear that these boot disks will actually boot the system:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;197063

Just run recovery. WIN2K will overwrite your OS files and write a new MBR. I had the same problem. Good luck.

You can install linux on the second hdd, set the boot loader grub/lilo on the first linux partition. Well hmm, here just go to this link. I cant explain it as good as this dude did, but It helped me duel booting with XP/RH9. win2k/Fedora. http://users.bigpond.com/pclim/help-desk/dual-boot/duel-boot.html
had me up and running in no time at all, hope this helps.

on a side note, if you have the problem of no floppy drive like i did. theres this neat lil prog called "explore2fs" that i used to see the linux partitions from windows and copy the linux_bs.bin file over.

Perhaps the expand command will work?
http://www.pctechnicians.ca/help/w2ktips.html#12

And a post with the same problem (but on XP),
http://www.tek-tips.com/gviewthread....779/qid/751290

It's not clear that these boot disks will actually boot the system:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;197063 [/B][/QUOTE]

first of all, thanks for ur time to help me out.

the expand command didn't seem to work. it says it can't find a file called "ntldr._" on the CD. i took a look at the post at tek-tips and it jus had all the steps i already did and didn't seem to hav a real solid solution to the problem. the guy jus reformatted his HD by the end of it. (not wut i really wanna do rite now).

i tried beatupbilly's idea and jus did a automatic recovery from the repair options, but that didn't change anything either.

NTLDR is still missing. it's kinda weird tho, i checked the c: directory and i could clearly see that the NTLDR file was there. could there be a file associated w/ntldr that makes the boot seem like it's missing it? is there a problem w/boot.ini?

when you installed linux, did you re-arrange the order of your drives?

In other words, was the hard drive that win2k on originally the master drive with drive letter C:\ and then you switched it to slave with drive letter D:\

Or did you manually move your win2k install folders over to another partition on the same drive, or move them to another drive all together?

The reason I am asking is because installing Linux shouldn't have messed with the ntldr at all unless you installed the grub or lilo on another partition other then in the master boot record. I know that I tried installing grub in another partition other then the mbr once and I had a similar problem (or the same, but I can't remember. It was a while back).

Gives us some details on exactly what you did before installing Linux and then let us know where you installed Lilo or Grub. This will help out a lot.

before linux, win2k was always on my C: and was always the primary master. i had both my CDROMS as slaves and had a small 4gig HD (Secondary Master) that i used for storage. when i decided to install linux, i changed the 4gig HD to a 20gig HD and installed linux there. during the Fedora installation, i remember the installer installing GRUB into hda, i'm assuming my C:. i don't remember touching the C: in any way other than the GRUB installation and i didn't partition it in any way.

sorry, but jus on the side, is there any way to access files in my C: using linux?

thanks again for any input u might have.

another quick question.. i noticed the ntldr in c:\ has the attribute "a" and nothing else. is this good?

Definately yes.
Linux can read (but not write to (safely)) NTFS filesystems.
Some distributions include NTFS support out of the box. Red Hat did not. I do not know about Fedora.
It involves having a module in your kernel and mounting the drive.
Perhaps a Fedora user can elaborate.

on my win2k install disc, I found the NTLDR file under the i386 folder and it wasn't named ntldr_, it was actually ntldr just like you would find it on the hard drive after win2k is installed.

Sounds like Grub installed correctly, so I don't know why this would have happened. If you would like to give it a try. I copied the boot.ini and ntldr files from my cd rom and hard drive to my server for you to download and look at. I would recommend just viewing the boot.ini file, since it's for XP, and compare it to your's. My XP install is on my C: drive, so it should match up for your win2k on your C: drive.

As for the NTLDR file, back up your's and try copying mine over to your hard drive. Again, this is from my win2k install disc, and it will hopefully work. But I had to name the NTLDR file NTLDR.BACK so that the browser would download correctly. Just rename the file to "ntldr" when you get it.

Rick click and select save as
NTLDR
Boot.ini

thanks for goin' as far as hostin' files for me jjustin01. the boot.ini seems to be alrite, but i don't think i'm copying the ntldr to my floppy correctly. can i just drag-and-drop the sucker or do i need to go as far as to rawrite it?

once you download the file from my server, just rename it from "NTLDR.BACK" to "ntldr". You should need to do anything other then that. I just tried downloading it and opened it in Quanta and Linux did nothing to it. So you can try to just download it, rename it to ntldr and then copy to floppy.

well, i did jus that and it doesn't seem to wanna copy from the Recovery Console. i really don't get this. no matter how many times i copy NTLDR from my CD to c:\, it always says it's missing. y won't this work?(!)

I'VE SOLVED MY PROBLEM!

i've lost all hope in booting from my CD that i jus decided to try booting from a floppy again. using jjustin01's NTLDR file and the NTDETECT.COM file from my CD, i booted from the floppy and it worked! although i did get a message after the VMI verifications:
Invalid BOOT.INI file
Booting from c:\winnt\

then a long pause.. and finally the good ol' loading bar for win2k.

thanks a lot for those of u who tried to help me out.

i do still hav a lil concern tho. at this point, i'm afraid of turning off my computer again cuz windows mite not load again. but now that i've booted it successfully, would it boot normally even w/o the floppy?

i checked my disk management and found 12mb of unallocated space in my C:. this is the MBR rite?

ok, thanks again. i'm gonna try to load up linux on my machine to the best of my ability. thanks again to all of u who replied.