PCTechNotes :: PC Tips, Tricks and Tweaks » Repair Guide

How to Fix “NTLDR is Missing” Error

slavezero — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 13:21:51 +0000

This is my comeback post. It’s been months since I last update my blog. For my comeback post I will be discussing on how to you can easily fix the error “NTLDR is Missing”, The reason why I chose this for my first post after months of absence is that I encountered this error 3 times in the last two weeks with my clients. To start off, some people tend to reformat their drives and re-install their operating system. but we can fix this without the need of reformatting and reinstalling your operating system.

The most common reason why this error occurs is when your computer tries to boot from a hard drive, flash drive or any media that are properly configured. Other possible causes can be a corrupt files, corrupt hard drive sectors, an outdated BIOS, and damaged or even loose IDE cables can be a cause.

To fix this:

First check your hard drive, other drive settings in BIOS and ensure that they are correct. If you see that there is nothing wrong with your hard drive and it’s settings, proceed to the step below.

Insert your Windows XP CD into your computer.

When prompted to press any key to boot from the CD, press any key. When you see the Windows XP setup menu press the “R” key to repair Windows.

Log into your Windows installation by pressing the “1″ key and pressing enter.

You will then be prompted for your administrator password, enter that password.

Copy the files below to the root directory of the primary hard disk. In the below example we are copying these files from the CD-ROM drive letter, which in this case is “e.” This letter may be different on your computer. if your cd or dvd drive is F: then replace “E:” with “F:”

copy e:\i386\ntldr c:\
copy e:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\

Once both of these files have been successfully copied, remove the CD from the computer and restart your computer.

This error normally occurs on Windows 2000-based or Windows XP-Based computer, so if you have a Vista or Windows 7 Operating system you will not encounter this problem because Windows Vista and Windows 7 does not boot like the previous versions. The MBR (Master Boot Record) of Windows NT4/2k/XP the is pointed to the NTLDR (New Technology Loader) and it takes it from there.

How To Change Your CMOS Battery

slavezero — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:46:04 +0000

Do you know how a tiny piece of battery that normally cost a few dollars can bring your high-tech PC screeching to a halt? this battery is called CMOS or complementary metal-oxide semiconductor. CMOS is just a little battery located on your motherboard, but this is not your ordinary battery that you can find powering your handheld calculators. The first signs that your battery is failing is that your clock started to run slow and you will notice that your computer keeps forgetting the date and time or your computer is having a problem finding and accessing certain peripherals or your PC refuse to boot, displaying a “CMOS Checksum Error” or “System Configuration Lost” message. When you experince those signs it’s time to change your CMOS battery.

Before you jump on replacing your CMOS batter, safety rules first. The inside of a computer is a bad place full of electricity and sharp edges. Make sure that your computer is unplugged from it’s power source. Also be careful on the inside of your computer, most computer cases are unfinished metal and has very sharp edges.

Here are the following tools you need to change your CMOS battery

1. a X-point screwdriver
2. an anti-static strap(optional but recommended)
3. a new battery (seems logical)

First, When you remove the old battery from the motherboard, the information that’s stored in the CMOS will be lost, so you should write down the BIOS settings.

Unplug all the cables from the back of the computer, if you are not familiar about the ports at the back of your computer you should make a note on where they came from so you can easily put them back when your finished.

Move the computer somewhere where you can work on it with ease.

Remove the cover by locating the screws around the outer edge at the back of your computer. Some computer cases only require you to remove 2 screws on one side then a panel can be removed allowing you access to the computers insides, others you must remove 6 screws and remove the whole case by sliding it to the rear and lifting it off.

Now make sure that you read and understand the safety instructions about static. — Dangers of a Static Electricity

Look inside and will see a round silver thing that’s almost a size of bottle cap. Carefully lift the retaining clip and slide the battery out.

Back to your computer insert the new battery by lifting the clip and sliding the battery in.

Reinstall your case and plug all the cables back (you did remember to label them didn’t you)

Power on your computer and check the bios, If you look carefully you will see a line that says something like “press del for setup” or some other key (F2 or ESC or tab) this will take you to god’s house (the BIOS) where you can make lots of changes to the way your machine works.

You will now be presented with a blue screen with a lot of options on it, The one we want is load optimised/default settings.

Exit and save your bios setting, your computer should now reboot.

If every thing went well then your computer will now be up and running.

Common Hard Drive Problems

slavezero — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:14:31 +0000

The most common problems originate from corruption of the master boot record, FAT, or directory. Those are soft problems which can usually be taken care of with a combination of tools like Fdisk /mbr to refresh the master boot record followed by a reboot and Norton disk doctor or Spinneret.

The most common hardware problems are a bad controller, a bad drive motor, or a bad head mechanism.

Can your BIOS see and identify the hard drive correctly? If it not, then the hard drives onboard controller is bad.

Does the drive spin and maintain a constant velocity? If it does, that’s good news. The motor is functioning.

If the drive surges and dies, the most likely cause is a bad controller (assuming the drive is cool). A gate allowing the current to drive the motor may not be staying open. The drive needs a new controller.

Do you hear a lot of head clatter when the machine is turned on and initialized (but before the system attempts to access the hard drive). Head clatter would indicate that the spindle bearings are sloppy or worn badly. Maybe even lose and flopping around inside.

There is always the possibility that the controller you are using in the machine has gone south.

Some Procedures that you can try to diagnose and troubleshoot your Hard drive

If the drive spins, try running Fdisk and check to see if Fdisk can see any partition on your hard drive. If Fdisk can see the partition, that means that it can access the drive and that the controller electronics are functioning correctly. If there is no head clatter, it may be just a matter of disk corruption which commonly occurs when a surge hits you machine and overwhelms the power supply voltage regulator. It commonly over whelms the system electronics allowing an EM pulse to wipe out the master boot record, file allocations table, and primary directory. Fdisk can fix the master boot record and there are tools that can restore the FAT and Directories.

The drive spins but Fdisk can’t see it. Try the drive in another system and repeat the test to confirm that Fdisk can’t read through the drives onboard controller. If it sees it in another system, then your machines hard drive interface is bad. You can try an upgraded or replacement controller card like a Promise or CMD Technologies (there are others) in you machine after disabling the integrated controller in the BIOS, but if the integrated controller went south, it may just be symptomatic of further failures and you’d be wise to replace the motherboard. Trying the drive in another machine also eliminates the variable that your machines 12 volt power output being bad.

If you get head clatter but a constant velocity on the drive motor (no surging), you might try sticking the hard drive in the freezer for about 12 hours. This is an old trick from back in the days of the MFM/ESDI driver era. This can cause the drive components to shrink enough to make the track marker align with the tracks. We don’t see that kind of platter spindle wear much anymore, but back in the old days, the balancing and bearings weren’t as good. Still, under the right circumstances, it might help. It would depend on how old the drive is and how many hours of wear have occurred. You have to be quick to get your info off the drive when it works. Back then, the drives were much smaller, so there wasn’t so much to copy. So, go after the important data first.

The drive doesn’t spin. Either the onboard controller is bad or the motor is bad (assuming you did try the drive in another machine). It’s time to hit the net and local independent shops to see if you can locate another drive of the same make and model that’s good. Since the drive is probably an older drive and no longer in distribution, your best bet is to find an identical used drive. If you know someone with the same make and model, you might be wise to try and persuade them to sell you their drive with an offer of providing them with a free upgraded drive. If you can locate an identical drive, start with the controller replacement… this is the simplest and least invasive. If swapping the controller doesn’t produce the desire result, you can tear into the drive and swap the motors. While you have both drive opened up to accomplish this, scrutinize the platters, heads and armatures. You might even hook the drive up and power it from a system with both drives attached. This way, you could see anything that deviates between the actions of both drives when they are initialized. Swapping patters is unlikely to produce any positive result. They are a balanced system like the tires on your car and I suspect that the balance will be different for each drive as will other variables.

Recommended Tools for your Hard Drive

1. Advanced Defrag

2. Final Sync – Automatically Synchronize Your Files!

3. Restore-Deleted-Files.com – Serious Data Recovery For Your Hard Drive!

How To Remove Duplicate or Incorrect Entry on XP Boot Menu

slavezero — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:37:26 +0000

My college friend called me asking for some advice about the computer she inherited from his brother. She said that whenever she boots she is presented with two boot options. She was annoyed that she doesn’t have a choice but to hit the enter key or wait 30 seconds to open Windows.

This issue has two ways to resolved one is editing the boot.ini or disabling it through the startup and recovery screen. The first option is a bit risky especially for non tech savvy users so we will just tackle the second option which is also the easiest way.

Ok, let’s start. First, right click on My Computer then select properties or go to Start –> Run then type sysdm.cpl. Either way will both present you the System Properties dialog. Once there go to Advanced then click the settings under Startup and Recovery.

In the Startup and Recovery dialog, make sure the default operating system is correct. Uncheck the option for “Time to display list of operating systems”, then close the dialog.

The menu should now be gone after you reboot your computer.

How to Fix Windows Security Reporting Antivirus Programs

slavezero — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:26:11 +0000

My friend recently uninstalled his two previous antivirus (McAfee and Norton). He said that after he completely uninstalled both AV’s, His Windows Security Center still reported that those programs are still installed on his machine.

What I did first was to check if there is anything running on the background but could not find any traces of any of the programs.

It seems that the issue is with the WFI repository folder is fully deleted or not fully uninstalled.

Here are steps I did to help him solve the issue.

1. Right-click on My Computer

2. Click on Manage

3. Click on the plus sign(+) next to Services and Applications in the left-hand column

4. Click on Services

5. Find the service called Windows Management Instrumentation, right-click on it, and choose Stop.

6. Open My Computer

7. Double-click on your C: Drive

8. Double-click on the Windows folder

9. Double-click on System32

10. Double-click on WBEM

11. Right-click on the Repository folder and click Delete and remove it

12. Close your My Computer windows and return to the Windows services screen using steps 1 – 4 shown above

13. Rebuild the repository service information by finding the Windows Management Instrumentation, right click on it then choose restart.

14. Restart your computer

How To Remove Pretty Park Worm

slavezero — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 13:50:31 +0000

A pretty worm at the park

This worm is not pretty as it’s sounded. This is a email worm like Happy99.exe. Pretty Park Worm is also known as prettypark.exe, files32.exe, or prettyorg.exe. The Windows system can get easily affected to this worm. Once pretty park is up and running it will try to automatically email itself every 30 minutes after it is loaded to every email addresses in your address book.

This not so pretty worm will also try to connect to an IRC server and will join a specific channel. To make itself connected and also to retrieve any IRC commands, it tries to sends information every 30 seconds. This is very dangerous because the author can get a hand and access to any information that includes computer name, product name, product identifier, product key, registered owner, registered organization, system root path, version, version number, ICQ identification numbers, ICQ nicknames, victim’s email address, and username and passwords. In addition, being connected to IRC opens a security hole in which the client can potentially be used to receive and execute files.

When Pretty Park is executed it creates a file called files32.vxd in the C:\Windows\System directory and modifies the following registry key located at

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\exefile\shell\open\command

from “%1″ %*

files32.vxd “%1″ %*

A new variant of the Pretty Park Worm also creates a similar change to the following registry key.

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shell\open\command

Below is the steps on how you can manually remove this worm. The procedure below requires registry modification, I highly suggest that you make a backup of your registry before your proceed.

1. Click Start –> Run.
2. Type REGEDIT, then click OK.
3. Modify the following Registry value:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\exefile\shell\open\command

and change

files32.vxd “%1″ %*

“%1″ %*

4. Repeat the above step for the following Registry Key

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shell\open\command

5. Find and Delete the PrettyPark.exe file.

6. Restart your computer.

7. Find and delete Files32.vxd located c:\Windows\System\Files32.vxd.

Want a more easier way to remove this worm? Download the pretty park remover below

Download PrettyParkCleaner

How to Fix “Internet Explorer cannot download filename from this particular webserver”

slavezero — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:59:30 +0000

A client came to my shop asking why he can’t download any files on his computer using Internet Explorer. I check his computer and his browser, all web pages loaded fine, I can even check mails, I can pretty much do everything online. However, when I try to download a file I received a message stating “Internet Explorer cannot download filename from this particular webserver”.

I tried installing Firefox and I successfully download the file. So the problem was definitely on Internet Explorer. I suggested to him that he use Firefox or other browser instead of IE. He refuses, what can I do he likes IE.

I started repairing his IE. It took me a lot of experiments trying to find the cause of the problem. After all those test I found out that the problem lies in the Temporary Internet Files folder. Sometimes the index.dat file can be damaged. If this happens, you need to delete the index.dat file and restart your computer. Below are the steps on how you delete the index.dat file.

1. Open Internet Explorer.

2. Click on Tools then Internet Options

3. On the General tab under Temporary Internet Files, click on Delete Files

4. Click Ok when it asks if you want to delete the files

5. Under the History section on the General tab, click Clear History, then click Ok

6. Close Internet Explorer

7. Log off the current user and Log onto another user account such as Administrator

8. Click on Start, Run then type CMD to open command prompt

9. Change directories to the Temporary Internet Files directory by typing the following command, substituting the correct drive letter and the word username with the correct user in Windows XP.

cd drive:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5

Example: cd c:\Documents and Settings\Mark\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5

10. Type del index.dat then press Enter

11. Close the command prompt by typing exit and hitting enter

12. Restart your computer

You should now be able to download files using Internet Explorer.

How to Diagnose DirectX on XP

slavezero — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:21:07 +0000

If you want to make sure that your directx is running perfectly or you want to fix some 3D application problems then running a directx diagnostic is the best solution.

To start the diagnostic, click on Start –> Run then type dxdiag

If you are running the diagnostics for the first time it will then ask you for your permission to check for WHQL Digital Signatures. Click Yes to continue.

After giving the permission the Directx Diagnostic Tool will now load. The default tab of Diagnostic Tool is system where it will show the general information about your system and most importantly it will show what version of DirectX you currently have installed on your machine.

click to enlarge

The directX tab is where all the directx files are listed. It will show if you have any critical files missing.

click to enlarge

The Display tab give you information about your video card. This is probably the most important because you can run some test here to check if your directx is running correctly.

The DirectX Diagnostic will not only give you information about your system and diagnose directx but it will also help you diagnose your sound and input devices.

How to Solve Your XP Memory Low Problem

slavezero — Thu, 14 May 2009 13:53:53 +0000

A friend of mine reach up to me and ask for some advice on how he can solve his memory low problem on his old Pentium 4 machine. When this problem appears he can’t use his computer, all he can do is close other programs or restart the computer which is very disturbing especially when you are in a middle of an important work. My first suggestion is to upgrade the RAM but there is a problem… it’s hard to find SDRAM memory sticks and are much more expensive than the latest RAM’s. My next suggestion is to increase the system page file or the virtual memory, and it works wonders for him.

Here is the guide to help you solve your memory low problem.

1. Right click on your computer then select properties

2. Click on the Advanced tab

3. Under Performance, Click on the Settings button

4. Look for the Virtual Memory on the Performance Options box then click Change

5. Set the Initial and Maximum size of your virtual memory. Set this up according to your Hard drive free space.

6. Click on OK and see the difference.

How to Protect yourself against Conficker Worm

slavezero — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:09:01 +0000

Conficker is a popular type of worm that spreads and infects other computers through network. This virus inflicts damage on vulnerable Windows system. If it successfully infiltrates your computers it will first try to attack the vulnerability in the Microsoft Server Service. This virus will also attempt to brute force admin password so it can easily and rapidly spread itself across the network. This will also infect all removable drives with an autorun file.

Business are priority target of this virus especially those who do not regularly update their desktops and servers in their networks. Home computers on the other hand are less at risk especially those computers that are protected with a good firewall and often updated.

Conficker is also known as Downup, Downadup and Kido some called it conflicter or conflicker.

Among the things you can do to protect your computers against this damaging virus is to make sure that you have applied the latest Microsoft Conficker patch. Network Administrators can use F-Secure’s Preemptive Blocklist to prevent the worm from accessing the web. And Finally you can disable Autorun to prevent your computer from being automatically attack.

Make sure that you have the latest Microsoft updates. Install a reliable Antivirus and be sure that it is updated regularly. Don’t let your computer with your firewall off.