Sorry for the long story, but need to give you this strange background:
I've got a virus attack and lost the explorer (desktop totally upon reboot). Only can use the task manager to run application to browse the internet at that time.
I was not able to remove it. Having download the McaFee Trial version but instead of solving the problem, McaFee created the firewall automatically upon installation and caused my network connection to browser unusable, though I still ping the ISP server.
However, I tried to start in safe mode to remove the firewall but not successful and I could not do anything at all.
Tried to Recover to last good start does not help at all and I got no choice but to reinstall Windows XP.
To my surprise that the original partition for windows was on Drive D: instead of Drive C: (now drive c: is having all the precious data and I don't want to lose it). I reformatted and reinstalled Windows XP Pro. to d: (partition 2) but at 99% completion, setup displayed that ntldr cannot be found and subsequent ntdetect.com cannot be found.
No choice but to finish the installation by pressing ESC.
Of course I will have "ntldr missing" on rebooting. But having used the Recovery Console to copy from E:> copy \i386\ntldr and then ntdetect.com to d: (d:\windows), the same problem exists and I tried fixboot and fixmbr, all failed to start Windows XP.
I saw boot.ini in c: drive with special attributes than other files but copying it to d:\windows (using Recovery console) did not help to bring the same attribute over to d:.
Anyone knows how to solve this problem. Many thanks.
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