NTLDR is missing

Takeshi_Kovacs

Hello, somebody may be able to help on this one. I just recently installed windows xp on my pc, and it has been running fine up until today, where upon loading i get a message saying "NTLDR is missing". I looked this error up on the interweb, and find a solution being using my xp disk to repair the installation. Unfortunately, the NTLDR error comes up straight after i get the message "press any key to boot from cd", and i cannot boot from cd.
Anyone got any ideas how i can fix this. I also can not boot into safe mode either...

DonkeyStyle \o/

Are you pressing the 'Any' key when it tells you to?

Capt'n Midnight

Check your BIOS ( Press Del to enter setup) to see that you are booting from the CD.

or on another machine with the same or later version of windows, make a boot disk, format a blank disk on that machine,
copy c:\ntldr c:\ntdetect.com and c:\boot.ini to the boot disk

Cal

Press any key to boot from CD should work. The fact that that message comes up shows it can see the boot sector on the CD.

Try again.

Cal.

DonkeyStyle \o/

Cal wrote:

Press any key to boot from CD should work. The fact that that message comes up shows it can see the boot sector on the CD.

My thoughts exactly... you're already booting from the CD at that stage... the prompt is just the xp CD being nice and asking if you want to continue or not if you just left the cd in the drive by mistake.

Tbh, I think someone is messing with you... screwed up your windows install and unplugged your keyboard... does anyone have a grudge against you?

Takeshi_Kovacs

Well i have checked in the bios that cdrom is booting first (which it is..), but the NTDLR error is coming up at the same time as the boot from cd message, have a look -->
and is stopping boot from cd...
Frakking Windows, there is always something wrong with it..

Guess i will have to down the deep and dark route of the floppy..

Ruu_Old

I don't think its picking up the boot sector of the CD at all. You should be getting a menu with something like, 'boot from hard disk' and 'boot from cd', I *think*. Is the CD ROM set as the first boot device in the BIOS menu?

Takeshi_Kovacs

Ruu wrote:

I don't think its picking up the boot sector of the CD at all. You should be getting a menu with something like, 'boot from hard disk' and 'boot from cd', I *think*. Is the CD ROM set as the first boot device in the BIOS menu?

Yep, double/triple checked bios settings.. and still no good. I am currently installing two floppy drives into both my pcs, to see if i can fix it via floppy disk..

DonkeyStyle \o/

Theory number two...
It's possible that your ram is seriously fudged... when a perfectly good windows CD starts giving guff, then you've got some problems.
I recently had a working XP cd complain of not being able to find certain files during the install ... happened on both CD drives across a number of XP CDs... swapped out the RAM and everything was suddenly hunky-dory.
You might try burning a bootable CD of memtest86 and checking it out... though you mightn't even get it to run if things are that badly borked.

Ruu wrote:

You should be getting a menu with something like, 'boot from hard disk' and 'boot from cd', I *think*.

My XP CD just gives the 'Press any key to boot from CD...' prompt then jumps right into the installer interface.
I don't get that 'Press any key' prompt from any other bootable CD. (eg. ubuntu doesn't ask, it just starts loading)
So it leads me to believe it's feature specific to the XP CD and not some BIOS nicety.

Takeshi_Kovacs

Well i finally got the xp cd to boot (swapped my usb keyboard for a p/s2 keyboard, and by pressing enter very quickly while it was booting up. So i started using repair console to copy across ntldr file from cd, but i am now getting a BSOD type 0x00000019 (bad_pool_header .. don't ya just love these kick ass error names..). So this method looks a no go, i will try making a boot floopy with the ntldr file tomorrow and see what happens..

Prisoner6409

Do you have more than 1 hard disk installed. I have got this message before and in my case it was caused by the non system hard disk(the one without XP installed) moving into first position(boot disk) in the bios and thus the pc is trying to boot from this disk.

Anti

I had this before, IT turned out to be that apci thing in the bios, ya know the advanced power blah blah, Sorry cant remember its full name. To cut a long story short i had to format the drive in another machine and install fresh. Dunno why Had alot of you in here helping and it didnt work.

Takeshi_Kovacs

OK so i formatted a floppy and put boot.ini, ntdetect.com and ntldr file onto it. put this floppy into my broken pc, and just as it starts to boot from the floppy (floppy is set as first boot in bios), another error appears on the screen saying
"<windows root>\system32\hal.dll file is corrupt or missing, and needs to be replaced"
I don't know what to do now, as i looked up a fix for this hal.dll problem, and see that i need to use the repair console to fix, but just my luck would have it, the repair console keeps crashing on me..
Maybe i did not create the boot disk properly. All i did was format a floppy and copy the boot.ini, ntdetect.com and ntldr files on to it.

Would reinstalling windows be the easiest option (or would it fix it all?

Anti

yeah reinstall windows, as repair installs are more hassle then their worth/

Capt'n Midnight

If the boot.ini files are different you may get that message - or it may be general corruption.

had that boot disk worked I have said boot up off cd into recovery console and run fixboot - you still can if you boot off the cd

check the BIOS for setting for legacy USB or other keyboard setting to allow a USB keyboard to work before the OS loads.