We have a PC at a remote site that has a corrupt ntldr file. All the NT system files are on the NTFS partition under the i386 directory. I am looking for a utility or driver that will allow us to access the partition from a boot disk and restore the corrupt file. NTFSDOS does not see the drive presumably due to the cluster size being 4K or due to the size of the volume (8Gig). There is no Emergency Recovery Disk nor boot disks on site. Any thoughts?

Beg the Microsoft gods for forgiveness. :) I was gonna suggest NTFSDOS but you beat me to it. Hmph.

Well, you have 2 problems now don't you? If NTFSDOS can't see it, it's most likely corrupted. With my system, NTFSDOS has no problem reading my 25gig NTFS partition perfectly. There is a way to boot NT from a floppy disk rather than the hard drive. The requirement is that you must have access to another, working, NT system. Get a blank floppy, and format it. (This is only to get the NT bootsector) Copy NTDETECT.COM, NTLDR, and a BOOT.INI file that has the correct settings for your unique system. When you boot from this disk, the NT loader menu will come up, and the system will use the copies of the files on floppy, rather than the ones on disk. When the system is booted, login as administrator, copy the files from floppy to Hard disk, and you should take my advice and never have a boot drive formatted in a filesystem that bootdisks can't read and write. (I have switched from using NTFS for 25gigs, to EXT2. There is a NT module that allows NT read/write access to ext2 file systems, and the best part is that my linux install, or any linux boot disk can read and write the files if there is ever a problem. OH, it also does not need to be defragmented, ever!)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA Norton Diskedit HAHAHAHAHAHAHA Even Bill knows how to fix this one!

I forgot about this. Get another hard drive and make it the master and your good hard drive the slave. Install NT to the new hard drive (master) and boot with it. You'll be able to access the NTFS partition on your slave drive and do whatever you want to it.

You could also put the drive in a working NT box as a slave & then pull them that way through the OS.