"NTLDR is missing" error on Windows 7

I was running a dual-boot XP Pro/Windows 7 box, with Windows 7 running on a second SATA drive. Finally decided to move the drive inside and surplus the XP drive. I hooked up the new drive internally and booted up, only to see it throw this error:

NTLDR is missing.

Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.

No amount of rebooting helped. We tried using the Winternals boot disk to no avail. Finally did some research and found a forum thread that helped.

Two issues were going on: I had another external hard drive that was set to "Active" in Disk Management. The second issue had to do with the missing XP drive; apparently, the dual-boot menu was stored on that system. Following the instructions on the Microsoft article, I ran the Bootrec.exe utility with each of the switches, each time testing using the /ScanOs switch. It kept showing that there were 0 Windows installations.

But I crossed my fingers and rebooted anyway. Lo and behold -- it worked! One or more of the switches fixed it. I booted into Windows, logged in, and Windows automatically downloaded and installed the latest drivers for my system -- including dual displays.

Migration From Windows XP to Windows 7

"Another install is currently in progress" error

If you see the error "Another install is currently in progress" on Windows, try rebooting. If that doesn't work (which is often the case), bring up the Task Manager and kill the msiexec.exe process.

Deleting Files That Won't Go Away

Windows' Secrets newsletter has a great article on how to give the boot to files that can't be deleted. I've run into this many times and there are some powerful (and free) utilities to the rescue. The newsletter requires a login but you can find the utilities at Gibin Software House.

Fix the WinXP File Search Bug

If you've ever searched the contents of files in Windows XP, you probably know that it only looks at some limited file types. Coming to the rescue is Agent Ransack, a free and award-winning file searching utility that even lets you save the results in CSV or plain text. You can save the search criteria, see the contents of the file in a preview pane, and use regular expressions for your searches. Very cool.