NTLDR is missing

Dara Robinson

My PC was working fine 10 mins ago and now it wont boot up and I get this msg:

---

NTLDR is missing
Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

---

Anyone know whats going on and how do I fix it? Apart from formatting, plz I'm only gonna format under a last resort

stevenmu

Boot of your windows cd, when given the choice go to the recovery console. This is kind of like a dos prompt, run the commands FIXMBR and FIXBOOT. Type exit to reboot and hopefully that'll be it. Failing that just do a reinstall to the same folder, choosing not to format, windows *should* detect your current installation and keep all the settings. I can't remember if this happens or not but you may end up with a different default My Documents folder so you may have to copy some stuff from that to your new one when you're done.

kenmc

could be signs of the HD going titsup as well....
if you get it up and running, now would be a good time to backup everything!

Dara Robinson

tahnx stevenmu, tried the 2 commands you gave me, no luck. same deal. I'll try to reinstalll as a second last resort

Anyone else have any ideas? Whats the hell does it mean when NTLDR is missing?

kenmc

means that it can't locate the bit of windows which boots the whole shebang.
may be worth your while getting a copy of Knoppix and booting this from CD and then you can get at your harddrives to backup anything you need.
It's Linux though, so if you don't know much about that you could be SOL.

stevenmu

Dara Robinson wrote:

Whats the hell does it mean when NTLDR is missing?

NTLDR is the file that starts loading windows, short for NT Loader, windows 2000 and xp being based on windows nt use it too. I forgot to mention the most common cause for this is trying to start the PC with a floppy disk in the drive, the PC tries load windows from this instead of the hard disk. It's something I've done a few times and can cause a bit of a panic, especially when you've just spent ages getting an install just right.

Dara Robinson

yea, now that you mention that I have seen that happen before but no, there was nothing in either drive. No floppy or cd. I went to reinstall XP and it had a repair section in the instilation area, so I am trying that. It deleted a load of system files and now is in a reinstall mode I hav enever seen before. Its still all blue (or what ever that colour is) and XP like. I'll keep you posted, hope this works though.

tahnx so far

astrofool

do u have a floppy disk in the drive ? it also causes that message. Solution: remove the floppy disk

Dara Robinson

hmmmm............ you didn't read the post just above yours, did you?

astrofool

probably not seeing as they were posted 4 minutes apart !

Johnny_the_fox

stevenmu wrote:

Boot of your windows cd, when given the choice go to the recovery console. This is kind of like a dos prompt, run the commands FIXMBR and FIXBOOT.

"Chkdsk /p" is the fix for that problem... and then "Fixboot".

Capt'n Midnight

Dara Robinson wrote:

tahnx stevenmu, tried the 2 commands you gave me, no luck. same deal. I'll try to reinstalll as a second last resort

Anyone else have any ideas? Whats the hell does it mean when NTLDR is missing?

Means the boot sector can't find that file - did you make any changes to the PC before it was restarted.

format a floppy disk on an NT/2K/XP PC (or one that says can't find NTLDR when you start the PC from it ) and copy the files ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini from c:\ on to the floopy - it may get you in to windows or you will get a different error message - windows is like that.

or search for ntldr in the forums..

Sherifu

This happened to me when i copied a thousand files to my c drive.
If you make a boot disk using three necessary files as described
in microsofts knowledge base its easily fixed.
I'll post link tomorrow.