sp2

After a successful installation of XP SP2, I was told that
I needed to
reboot the computer to continue. I restarted and the
machine refused
to boot. I get an error right after POST stating the ntldr is
missing, press CTRL-ALT-DEL to continue. I've detailed
the steps
from the support team to fix this problem (although it
didn't work) at
the bottom of this message.

Background: Windows XP Home - freshly installed about 2
months ago
because of new hard drive - 256 MB RAM, 1 Ghz PIII -
Perfectly stable
machine - On 24 hrs/day.

[INDIA RANT ON] After searching the web for a solution, I
called
Microsoft Technical Support for Service Pack 2. As it
turns out,
Technical Support for this company is in India and these
folks have no
clue what to do. When they run out of answers, they have
no one to
turn to for help. Besides the fact that they weren't
helpful, they
spoke terrible English and we kept repeating ourselves.
What a waste
of time. Their final answer, delete your hard drive
partition and
reinstall the OS and all of your applications! I was told
that I
MIGHT lose some data doing this. Also, I was told that I
should boot
into safe mode. I spent 5 minutes explaining what the OS
loader's
(ntldr) function was -- booting. No OS loader, no safe
mode. Any
Indian that is remotely qualified quickly quits their $3/hr
job and
comes to America to do better. This doesn't leave much.
Sorry for
the rant, but why have unqualified people answering the
phone with no
escalation path!!! [INDIA RANT OFF]

Back to the problem and resolution... Here are the steps
that we
tried. Maybe it'll help someone else.

1) Boot into Recovery Console using the CD
2) FIXMBR - this supposedly fixes problems with the Master
Boot Record
3) FIXBOOT - this rewrites a new boot partition
4) Assumed ntldr is corrupt, so copy a new version of ntldr and
ntdetect.com from d:\i386 where d: is the CD.
5) CHKDSK /R
6) BOOTCFG /REBUILD - this rebuilds the boot.ini file if it
7) I was even asked to reinstall Windows. However, this solves
nothing, since a Windows installation does not touch the boot
partition, unless the OS finds that it is a complete new
installation
on a new partition. I tried both a repair installation of
Windows and
a Fresh installation of Windows. Neither would boot.

After each of these commands, we ended up rebooting the
computer. In
my case, none of these steps fixed the problem. Once I
deleted the
partition and reinstalled Windows, I was back up and
running. Now,
I'm 2 hours into my 6 hours reinstallation ordeal! I now
have XP home
loaded, + SP2, + Office. Much more to do.

ADVICE: BACKUP YOUR DATA before corrupting your system
with SP2.

The technican had no advice for being able to save my data.
Luckily,
this was a sedonday machine and had nothing important on it.