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NTLDR is Missing after moving drive to other IDE controller

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First post, by Yottabit

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Peculiar situation for me, I have a Win98 / Win2000 multiboot setup that works nicely on a 120 GB SSD using an IDE to SSD adapter off the motherboard’s built in ATA/66 controller.

I first used fdisk to create a 40 GB FAT32 partition (with Large Disk Support on), then installed Win98SE. Then installed Windows 2000 on an 80 GB NTFS partition I specified.

I have a Promise Ultra 133 TX2 PCI card now and I’d like to switch the SSD over to that. Everything gets recognized by the Promise BIOS etc but then I get an “NTLDR is missing” instead of my boot menu

Does anyone have experience with this exact situation (moving an multi-boot setup to a different IDE controller?) My guess is that the problem could be in the boot.ini ?

I just don’t know what changes I’d even have to make to fix it. Bootloader stuff scares me to death to be honest and I usually try to avoid it and swap drives instead 😂

Would a tool like BootPart help here?

In the future should I explore other tools beside NT bootloader for this multiboot stuff? Appreciate any feedback

Reply 1 of 3, by Yottabit

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From reading some other threads on here, I think I will try out Plop boot manager. I will move the SSD to the other controller and boot it off floppy, and see if it can get me into the OS. If so, I’ll install it to MBR.

I’m still morbidly curious about how to fix the NTLDR issue natively though.

Reply 2 of 3, by bakemono

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Might need to change the drive number in the boot sector code. But even if you did that, I wouldn't be surprised if it then failed with a 7B inaccessible boot device

GBAJAM 2024 submission on itch: https://90soft90.itch.io/wreckage

Reply 3 of 3, by Yottabit

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I tried Plop and it is a cool utility but realized I didn’t have my disk partitioned correctly to take the best advantage of it. I could only use it to boot me back to the NT bootloader.

Instead I settled on solving the problem in hardware.
“Kingwin Universal Hot Swap Mobile Rack For 2.5” or 3.5” SSD/HDD, Internal Tray-Less SATA Hard Drive Backplane Enclosure”

And a pack of Inland 2.5” 120 GB SSD drives I can pop in and out. Did I mention I really hate bootloaders?

My Startech IDE to SATA adaptor fits snugly right in the back of the Kingwin unit (I wasn’t sure it would actually fit) and works nicely.

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