NTLDR is missing?

[Franz316]

So I went on vacation for a week and I get home tonight. I go turn on my computer and right after it checks the CDs to boot I get: "NTLDR is missing Press Ctrl-ALt-Del to reboot".

No one has touched the computer for 7 days so I don't know where this problem is coming from. I did some research and found out it has something to do with the boot sequence. The only thing is that all the websites say it comes from upgrading to XP from Win98 or lower. I installed WinXP Pro from scratch on this computer...

I can try to reinstall WinXp but it says it may remove My Documents and I have a bunch of stuff in there that I need, so I don't know if it is worth the risk.

Any ideas on getting this file back?

Thanks
-David

 

[mechBgon]

Your floppy drive doesn't happen to have a floppy in it, does it?

 

[Franz316]

No, it didn't

 

[crobusa]

I'm assuming you have XP. The error occurs when it can't find hidden system files on the the partition it's expecting.
Try going to a recovery console and typing "FIXBOOT" or if you have only one partiition and not dual-booting fdisk /mbr.
Before messing with recovery.. If you DO have dual boot, or access to a hard drive with win98 is a prog that lets you read NTFS and back it up. I think it was NTFS4DOS or ntfs4win, something like that.

 

[dpid]

you know what, i had this happen to me before on two computers...

one was result of a hard drive turning bad (sectors were becoming bad)... so when the computer booted up, some of the time it didn't recognize the HD (thus thinking no OS was installed) while recognizing slave HD and CDROM.

the other computer... this one's HD was fine, so I was confused to why this was happening. well, here's the funny thing, i open up my case, and just make sure all the IDE cable and the power supply cable to the HD was tight. It seemed tight, but when I powered up the CPU, it worked. this happen a few times, and everytime, i just opne the case, jiggle the cables or actually take them off and insert them again. it usually works.

hope this helps, a bit unscientific, but sometimes one just has to use unorthodox procedures.

 

[toeng]

I just had that problem 2 days ago. I didn't know what it was, the computer was working fine before I opened the case. After that, everytime I reboot, I just got NTLDR is missing message. I ended up formatting the whole thing ...

 

[Franz316]

I'll try some of those suggestions in a minute but if it helps here are the specifics to the way my system is set up...

I am not dual booting
There are 2 partitions (c and d) D has windows installed
Windows XP Pro was installed from scratch

 

[Franz316]

Ok...
cable thing-didn't work
Fixboot-says it did make a new one but didn't help
fixmbr-also said it did but didn't fix the problem

Fdisk was not a command option listed under help. I think I am out of ideas, what are the chances that the Windows installation will erase the My Documents folder?

 

[crobusa]

Not likely.. If your that scared and have an extra HD, install DOS on it and go here or if you have a spare Win98 cd, use this, that way you can burn it to a CD-R. If you've ever messed around with Linux, it can mount NTFS read only.

From personal experience, I had a tech convince me to use XP repair to fix my DSL.. (heh, stupid me) So Repair BSODs and winxp won't boot. So I Installed completly over old install, but used different user name.. was able to get everything back. (It erased and reinstalled C:\windows, but kept C:\documents and settings\username)

NTFS4DOS and NTFS4WIN can only read.. but that's all you need. It's amazing it's free for personal use.

If you do use NTFS utils, you'll need some files, but I believe you can find them on the CD as well as on the HD.
Personally, I still use FAT32 for everything. (The maxtor install cd can create 127 gig Fat32, I believe.)
Good luck