I wish there was an easier fix to repair ntldr when you clear it with fdisk /mbr 😉 As bloodycactus say, this is getting quite confusing. Maybe bootit mean "usb drive" as in "any removable disk" such as CF, I wasnt aware of a removable bit on usb drive. I've re-read the thread and it talk about CF and installing windows but never mention which version, the only version I know that refuse is win2000 (maybe nt4), I dont think he mention booting problem and usb stick or usb cf adapter. Anyway I'll do some experimentation with bootit on spair CF tonight, post my results then abandon thread because of the confusion... joking, hopefully ratcatcher will straighten that up!

BloodyCactus wrote:

yeah but you cant do 'fdisk /mbr" against a CF card, that was the whole point you had to use a utility to actually create it on CF cards, USB sticks etc.

But that's exactly what I did 😀

Simply of a MS-DOS boot disk. I must have tried at least 6 different brands / manufacturers of CF / SD cards. Had to do this with all of them. What happens is that you can partition, format and install DOS, but it will hang trying to boot.

Run fdisk /mbr and that solves that issue.

So yea, it's odd.

Of course you can do msdos fdisk /mbr on a CF, maybe he mean if the CF is not the primary master? Hence using another tool or linux fdisk where you can specify the target.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

BloodyCactus wrote:

yeah but you cant do 'fdisk /mbr" against a CF card, that was the whole point you had to use a utility to actually create it on CF cards, USB sticks etc.

But that's exactly what I did 😀

heh 😉 then it did not do what you think it did, fdisk /mbr always will overwrite the mbr on c:, fdisk /mbr puts new boot code on, but it does not change the disk partition data. obvs, if you had a working mbr on c:, doing fdisk /mbr would not do anything visible.

putting a CF card in and running fdisk /mbr only updates the boot code on the existant c: drive,

I mean, doing that from booting a win98 and putting a cf/sd card in the card reader...

but if you have a cf2ide and boot a floppy and the CF is drive 0, I can see fdisk /mbr working in that case.

so i guess it depends how you boot the cf to how you can get fdisk /mbr working or not.

BloodyCactus wrote:

but if you have a cf2ide and boot a floppy and the CF is drive 0, I can see fdisk /mbr working in that case.

^^ That is what I'm doing. For some reason it was necessary for me to do this on all CF cards, but only once, to make it boot.

yeah I realised at the end we were probably talking the same thing 😀 making dinner, kids yelling + doing homework + writing on forum all same time probably not a good idea for me 😜

Same here BloodyCactus, my house need an heavy cleaning for the spring, single guy in a house that can get dirty 😁. Anyway I've look for a simple way to check the bootit utility and didnt find an easy way to do with without a long messing up with what is already working well. I can understand why the confusion installed now. A friend will come here this week-end and bring an CF card to USB adapter and I'll check it easy on my winxp tc1100. Until then...