Customer had another technician upgrade his HDD from 40Gb to 250Gb… the 40Gb drive was failing.

The tech booted the xp cd, created a 250gb partition, then installed windows.

At some point (after a few weeks), the PC began to refuse to start, giving the error: ntldr is missing. press ctrl alt del to restart.

The technician tried a repair install, but it wouldn’t complete (due to the ntldr error).

Its at this point that I get called to help.

The PC seems a bit old, but it is running a 1.3Ghz celeron, even though the mobo is an old spacewalker mv25v1.1

I’m tempted to say its a motherboard fault, but there is no other indication that the mobo is at fault.

I end up taking it to the office, and try the hdd in a few other Pentium 3 systems… but all give similar errors… except the bios in some would show the 250GB drive as a 137Gb drive…

Now that make me wonder if the drive is compatible with the older system…

I find that many older bioses have a 137Gb limit on the hard drive size… could it be that this is whats going on here?

Well, I decide to split the drive into partitions (122Gb for xp, and a 128GB one as an extra drive).

It worked well, but I guess only time will tell.