NTLDR is missing when updating the BIOS

[Damnation]

Dietmar knows how to switch properly from Standard PC to ACPI.

@Dietmar can you show him how you did this?

[Cixert]

On 4/24/2024 at 10:54 PM, Cixert said:

SOLVED
It's a strange hard drive alignment problem.
I have verified that the partition is active with WinPE. From this all the data on the hard drive is perfectly accessible.
However, I have booted a CD with MiniTool Partition Wizard Home 8.1.1 and I see that it does not indicate any active partitions. When I click on the "Boot Active partition" option, MiniTool tells me that it could not find the Windows installation.
It's weird, with the Windows installation CD I can log into repair mode.
Then I clicked on MiniTool on the align partitions option.
Now the partition has been aligned to LBA 2048.
I don't remember how much this one was aligned to before, surely 63.
When I rebooted the error persisted, but I clicked in the BIOS on the "IDE HDD Auto Detection" option and then Windows XP began to boot.
It is a strange problem, also with the BIOS update the hard drives have a hard time being detected, when I restart these make noises trying to boot for several seconds, with the BIOS old version it does not happen.
There is no problem if I start the computer directly, the problem is when resetting.

REASON
I think I have found the reason why the BIOS updates only supported hard drives aligned to 2048 and the error NTLDR is missing aligned to 63 occurred. And the cause is the usual one on slot 1 motherboards "a RAM memory bad contact".
I was having more and more problems, hard drives when starting Windows that sometimes wouldn't read a file and finally the Windows CD-ROM said it wouldn't read a file when booting.
Curiously, once Windows started, there were no problems, only files were missing from the boot.
The BIOS said that I had 392 MiB RAM, but I removed and cleaned the SD-RAM modules and it turned out that I have 512 MiB RAM.
Now the disks aligned to sector 63 are read, well except for a Seagate 40 GB that does not boot at either 63 or 2048. The funny thing is that it does boot if I first detect in the BIOS a Seagate with 20 GB and change the hard drive without updating information.
In any case, the latest BIOS update v3.08 continues to cause several start attempts on all hard drives when resetting the system. Which v3.07 doesn't do. The problem is that only v3.08 supports hard drives with +32GB.
In conclusion, this motherboard is very very problematic as a whole.

Edit:
To boot Windows from the Seagate 40 GB hard drive in Award BIOS, go to the IDE HDD AUTO DETECTION option and detect it. Then go to the STANDARD CMOS SETUP option and change the "Mode" option from LBA to AUTO, if in the SECTOR column it marks 255, change the value to 63.

Edited April 27 by Cixert

[genieautravail]

Ooops, bad answer!

Sorry...

Edited April 26 by genieautravail

[genieautravail]

@Cixert

Perhaps by running Syprep with Mini Setup option enable on your XP installation:

https://www.petenetlive.com/KB/Article/0000599

https://toolscenter.lenovofiles.com/help/index.jsp?topic=%2Fdpsccm%2Fdpsccm_t_running_sysprep_w2003.html

Reseal the computer with the option.

Just restart the computer at the end of the process.

That will launch the Mini Setup and if your computer is ACPI compatible, the setup will switch from a standard PC to ACPI.

A good advice: do a disk image of the computer before, just in the case...

Regards

Edited April 26 by genieautravail

[Tripredacus]

13 hours ago, Cixert said:

Do you know if there is a way to install ACPI.SYS on a Standard PC installation? (then I would change the HAL files)

I never did try to convert this portion of a system. If it happened to me, I would probably clone the disk, then attempt a repair install.

[Cixert]

Thanks @Tripredacus, I have tried to repair XP but I have a volume OEM copy and the repair option does not come, so another parallel XP has been installed in C:
Now that I have the BIOS updated, the new copy neither has ACPI installed. The only new thing is that it has installed a tab called APM, but without any advantage. It neither suspends nor hibernates.

Thanks @genieautravail, the only way I have found to install ACPI on this computer is by pasting a system image with ACPI created from another computer, so it works without problems.

I am reading this method
https://falconfour.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/how-to-switch-windows-xp-hal-_back_-from-standard-pc-to-acpi-the-clean-way/comment-page-1/
But the result is the same as the method that I have and that I published here.
https://msfn.org/board/topic/177962-activate-all-processor-cores-at-startup/?do=findComment&comment=1156790
If Windows XP never had ACPI, when switching from Standard PC to ACPI so BSOD 0x7B occurs due to the  drivers lack.
If it go from ACPi to Standard PC and then from Standard PC to ACPI, there is no problem.

I still have to try the ACPI 2.0 method, I have to look at it calmly, I don't quite understand it
https://msfn.org/board/topic/183464-compiling-acpi-v20-driver-for-windows-xp-sp3-and-windows-2003-sp2-x32x64/
@Damnation with v7777 acpi.sys you were referring to this link?

EDIT:
I am opening a new post to address this specific issue.
https://msfn.org/board/topic/186159-change-hal-from-standard-pc-to-acpi-pc/

 

Edited April 27 by Cixert

[Tripredacus]

I don't know what a volume OEM copy means. I have done a repair install using an OEM Recovery CD before, but it has been awhile. I also know some OEMs removed the ability to do repair install.

[Cixert]

On 4/29/2024 at 3:50 PM, Tripredacus said:

I don't know what a volume OEM copy means. I have done a repair install using an OEM Recovery CD before, but it has been awhile. I also know some OEMs removed the ability to do repair install.

Sorry, I confused the terms. I meant a VL-VOL-VLK copy.
These do not have a repair console or the option to install with repair.