Vinny Eggers emailed to let me know of an unexpected fix.
He had cloned a hard drive, and when he went to use it in another computer, all he got was a blinking cursor.
Both computers had their hard drive type set to "IDE" but were modern computers that also offered "AHCI". Just to try something different to see if he could get it working, Vinny switched the new computer to AHCI and got the BSOD 0x07B screen you would expect to see for a "Windows installed as IDE, and now BIOS attempting to boot as AHCI".
However, this let him know that the hard drive was working, and had a Windows installation going because after the BSOD it would reboot and get to the "Boot in Safe Mode?" prompt.
So Vinny goes back into the BIOS, sets the data type back to IDE, and uses the ntldr is missing bootable cd as the boot device, which bypassed whatever was going on that was just causing the flashing cursor. So Windows loads just fine.
Now the fix, which worked here; was to go ahead and load the AHCI drivers into the Windows installation, then set the data type to AHCI, and it booted and worked just fine on it's own. AHCI is supported by Windows XP from Service Pack 2 forward, so you'll need that to if you don't already have it.
I'll include some of his email so you can get how he got the AHCI drivers into Windows.
"""
He had cloned a hard drive, and when he went to use it in another computer, all he got was a blinking cursor.
Both computers had their hard drive type set to "IDE" but were modern computers that also offered "AHCI". Just to try something different to see if he could get it working, Vinny switched the new computer to AHCI and got the BSOD 0x07B screen you would expect to see for a "Windows installed as IDE, and now BIOS attempting to boot as AHCI".
However, this let him know that the hard drive was working, and had a Windows installation going because after the BSOD it would reboot and get to the "Boot in Safe Mode?" prompt.
So Vinny goes back into the BIOS, sets the data type back to IDE, and uses the ntldr is missing bootable cd as the boot device, which bypassed whatever was going on that was just causing the flashing cursor. So Windows loads just fine.
Now the fix, which worked here; was to go ahead and load the AHCI drivers into the Windows installation, then set the data type to AHCI, and it booted and worked just fine on it's own. AHCI is supported by Windows XP from Service Pack 2 forward, so you'll need that to if you don't already have it.
I'll include some of his email so you can get how he got the AHCI drivers into Windows.
"""
- Boot the PC with the NTLDRfix CD
- When in Windows, remove the CD and download the appropriate AHCI driver for your machine (manufacturers usually list it as a pre-install SATA driver, or AHCI F6 driver)
- Go into the Device Manager and look for IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
- Expand the list and right-click on the storage controller (commonly ICH9 etc) and click update driver
- Choose the option at the bottom of the list and click next, keep doing this until you're met with a list of drivers
(select the manufacturer and model of your hardware device.....)
- Click Have Disk and proceed to install the driver from the location you downloaded/extracted the driver to
- Acknowledge any warnings and restart the machine once you're done (you may have more than one SATA controller to update)
- Go back into the BIOS before the computer boots and switch to AHCI
All going well, your PC should be booting all by itself and with native disk drivers!
"""
Thanks Vinny!
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