SDCentral clobbered my boot sector (?!)

from Stardock Forums
Can't be sure, as it may have been coincidence... but I downloaded SDCentral on Tuesday and when I rebooted the next day my NTLDR (I am running Win2k) was gone!
Didn't think it was SDC but have read a few other users had similar hassles.
All fixed now and there was no data loss, but will be using the manual download method that Brad is putting up. I am hoping future bonus packs etc. will be available without having to use SDC as I am a bit hesistant about having it on my pc!
388 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
It crunched mine too....boy was I pi$$ed. I do like the game but I really wonder who in the he11 tested it.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
We are really sorry about that,(:( it seems it was a problem with a early relase version of SDCentral and not the game.
Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
It did the same on my unit running XP. Ditto on the being hesitant about SDC. I hope the cd arrives soon or there is some other way for the beta testers to download the game. The game is lots of fun.

Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
Yea, unfortunately an earlier beta of Stardock Central caused this. It's been corrected. It was trying to delete "temporary files". Sorry for the inconvenience.
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
For those of you who corrected this problem, is there a way to recover short of reformating? I've tried using the system recovery panel to recreate the boot sector but that didn't help. Any advice would be appreciated.
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
Dude there are tons of messages on the forum on how to fix this. A couple sticky messages, and another along the lines of Attn: Win98/ME users.

Check those out, if you still cant get it to work, hit the chat room.
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
Which OS you running? I can post here the ones for your OS.
Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top
For W2K - boot off your Windows CD, can't remember the exact steps (but you can find it via Knowledge Base on Microsoft.com... search on NTLDR missing).
You need to copy NTLDR and ntdetect.com from \i386 on your CD to your root drive.
You will also need to recreate C:\boot.ini, which you can get from your Emergency Recovery Disk. I didn't have one and copied it from another Win2K PC.

My boot.ini has the following:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

Assuming you have one hard drive and one partition with Win2K on partition (1) this should work for you.

As Brad and Alex stated - this was only a problem with the prior version of SDC. The one that you download after you order Galciv is fine.