Hi I am new to the forum and to Puppy.DMcCunney wrote:Weird. If something trashed the Master Boot Record, I can see something like this occurring. That's not hard to fix, but is a bit tedious.Colonel Panic wrote:Thanks for answering, Dennis;DMcCunney wrote: This sounds like an incomplete installation of some sort. I can't see how running Puppy from a live CD should do this.
Did this persist after a power cycle?
Yes it did. There was no installation; I took the CD out of the drive and tried to boot from the hard drive as usual, with this result.
I can't see why it might have happened either, but it did. According to our expert, a couple of pointers went missing from the Windows XP boot loader (NTLDR) and one of them linked to the hard drive. It's worrying me somewhat because I've always used Puppy on public computers on the understanding that it's completely "safe" to run it from a CD-ROM and a savefile on the hard drive, as I did in this case.
I'd be very startled if a standard Puppy CD did that. I can't say for sure about a custom Puplet. It might have been coincidence, or it might have been an improperly housebroken Puppy, making a mess where it wasn't supposed to. Give a copy of the CD to the tech at the community center, and ask him to look at it. You want a second opinion to rule out Puppy being at fault.
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Dennis
I bought this computer recently because I am a wannabe writer (never published) who needs a machine exclusively for word processing, so I didn't care that the laptop was old. I was appalled, however, at how slow XP Professional was running on it, I formated the HD and I installed Puppy 5.1 on it to speed it up. It worked great and I am very happy with how fast it is .
However, when I went to reboot for the first time "NTLDR is missing" error came up so everytime I boot I have to insert the Puppy CD twice, once to get the error, second to boot the system.
I was very happy to see this post and that there was a fix, but I am sorry that it is tedious .
Dennis, could you share the fix with me?
Liam
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Gateway 9550 Laptop: Pentuim III - 1066MHz with 254MB RAM, 20 GB hard drive