You're gonna earn your wings on this one. Here's the background leading up to the problem:
Have been using win98. Installed winXP on same drive in new primary partition as a FAT32 (easier interfacing with win98 and all my files). Got XP set up looking and running as I wanted (after about 2 weeks), regularly swithching between the two OS's (dual booting) with no problem. Yesterday, I decided it was time to dump 98. Now the trouble starts: made XP the active partition (using Partition Magic) and rebooted as required. Whe XP boots up, this error message appears: ntldr missing. I go hunting and can't find it either, not knowing, at the time that it (along with ntdetect and boot.ini) are sitting in win98 root directory. So I can't boot either OS. I go back and reverse the process (make XP inactive, 98 active). Now 98 boots fine, but when I choose XP, I get error messages: " xmnt 2002 program not found...autochk skipped" and "autochk.exe not found...autochk skipped." These are blue screen error messages. The computer then reboots. It will continue in this endless loop, if I let it. I found the autochk.exe file, installed it in the win98 windows//system32 directory, which eliminated the latter message, but I'm still stuck with the "xmnt 2002 program missing" message. I tried correcting it thru:
1) XP cdrom restoration; 2) booting thru a floppy boot disk with the critical boot files (boot.ini, ntldr, ntdetect); and 3) perform a "fixboot" thru XP recovery. none of which worked. And I found no other solutions online. I did find out, in my search into Microsoft support, that XP/FAT32, will not find ntldr. I guess I should've converted XP to NTFS before making it active. Apparently, when I made XP the active OS, it screwed up the boot system and I've been unable to correct it. In any event, I need to boot into XP. I spent too much time setting it up and fine tuning it to lose it all now. Plus, I have updated files and software in there. I don't want to have to start all over again. First one who comes up with the solution gets a new car!! (-: Honestly, I REALLY DO NEED YOUR HELP!
