NTLDR is missing

[DavidoFoo]

Windows Xp Pro

I think I may have accidentally moved/deleted my boot.ini file. What do I do?

fyi: no floppy drive or winxp cd

 

[theMan]

download Knoppix if you have another computer. its a bootable linux OS. from there, you will be able to figure out what happened to your boot.ini . i dont know much about this OS, but i think everything is write protected. i think there is a way to get around it, but im not sure how to do it. so if you need to edit your boot.ini you need someone else to tell you how to do that.

good luck, hope it all works out (it always does)

 

[DavidoFoo]

Originally posted by: theman
download Knoppix if you have another computer. its a bootable linux OS. from there, you will be able to figure out what happened to your boot.ini . i dont know much about this OS, but i think everything is write protected. i think there is a way to get around it, but im not sure how to do it. so if you need to edit your boot.ini you need someone else to tell you how to do that.

good luck, hope it all works out (it always does)

I burn the .iso onto a cd and then what do I do?

 

[DavidoFoo]

Originally posted by: DavidoFoo

Originally posted by: theman
download Knoppix if you have another computer. its a bootable linux OS. from there, you will be able to figure out what happened to your boot.ini . i dont know much about this OS, but i think everything is write protected. i think there is a way to get around it, but im not sure how to do it. so if you need to edit your boot.ini you need someone else to tell you how to do that.

good luck, hope it all works out (it always does)

I burn the .iso onto a cd and then what do I do?

or, is there a way to create a winxp boot cd-rom without a copy of winxp?

 

[theMan]

set the bios to boot from cd. then pop in the cd, and let it go. if you still get the ntldr missing message, its not windows. not sure what could cause it. try taking out alll non-essential things connected to your computer like cd-drives.

 

[DavidoFoo]

Originally posted by: theman
set the bios to boot from cd. then pop in the cd, and let it go. if you still get the ntldr missing message, its not windows. not sure what could cause it. try taking out alll non-essential things connected to your computer like cd-drives.

how do i set the bios to boot from cd?

pop in the cd with the knoppix.iso? or the cd with winxp on it

 

[DavidoFoo]

Originally posted by: DavidoFoo

Originally posted by: theman
set the bios to boot from cd. then pop in the cd, and let it go. if you still get the ntldr missing message, its not windows. not sure what could cause it. try taking out alll non-essential things connected to your computer like cd-drives.

how do i set the bios to boot from cd?

pop in the cd with the knoppix.iso? or the cd with winxp on it

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q314079
Can I do this with a cd instead of a floppy?

 

[montag451]

Hi,
Download NTLDR for winXP Pro from one of these sites:
http://www.google.com/search?q=ntldr+do...sourceid=opera&num=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Transfer it on to your c: drive [or wherever Win is].
Should boot up if it was only the NTLDR that got moved.

Alternatively, Boot from the Win CD, and choose the second option to repair windows

 

[speed01]

How do you accidentally move or delete a Windows system file?? Anyway, are you sure your hard drive is working correctly? Did the boot order in the bios get changed? It is still set to boot from the HD first correct? The reason I ask is because there are other reasons for not finding the NTLDR besides an OS problem. What happened immediately prior to not beind able to boot? Did the machine crash, lock up, power outage ect...

Speed

 

[theMan]

the only time thats happened to me is when i accenentally boot from a floppy thats in my drive. strange. i would just do a repair install of xp

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: theman
the only time thats happened to me is when i accenentally boot from a floppy thats in my drive. strange. i would just do a repair install of xp

Suggestions:

Take the KNOPPIX CD and take a look at your bad PC's C: drive. You should have a \WINDOWS directory and in the root of C:, ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini. Do you have all of that? If not, copy the files from another machine (speaking of the three files on C:\) and try to boot again.

If I had to guess, assuming you just deleted the file, you can be up and running in just a few minutes by copying the file over.

Bear in mind that for the KNOPPIX CD, you want to burn the ISO file as an image onto the CD. You don't want there to be a single file called 'knoppix.iso' on the CD - you want to burn the ISO as an image file.

 

[theMan]

use burn4free to burn the .iso if u havent done this already

 

[Bushman5]

I had that same problem. if you have 2 hd it mite be trying to boot from the none windows hd make sure in your bios their isnt a hard drive for boot priority. that was my problem

 

[FlyingPenguin]

May sound silly, but you also get this error if you left a non-bootable floppy in the floppy drive. Happens all the time.

Otherwise, that's the generic error you get whenever a drive doesn't have a bootable partition on it.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: DavidoFoo
Windows Xp Pro

I think I may have accidentally moved/deleted my boot.ini file. What do I do?

fyi: no floppy drive or winxp cd

Microsoft says:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;318728

(Basically, check the boot.ini, ntldr, ntdetect.com files and make sure they're there.)

 

[DavidoFoo]

Originally posted by: montag451
Hi,
Download NTLDR for winXP Pro from one of these sites:
http://www.google.com/search?q=ntldr+do...sourceid=opera&num=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Transfer it on to your c: drive [or wherever Win is].
Should boot up if it was only the NTLDR that got moved.

Alternatively, Boot from the Win CD, and choose the second option to repair windows

How do I transfer the NTLDR to my c: drive?

I only have a Winxphome disc right now, so I'm not sure if I can use an xphome disc to do a repair install on my xppro system. I wanted to do a fixboot, but I don't have the administrator password.

 

[DavidoFoo]

Originally posted by: speed01
How do you accidentally move or delete a Windows system file?? Anyway, are you sure your hard drive is working correctly? Did the boot order in the bios get changed? It is still set to boot from the HD first correct? The reason I ask is because there are other reasons for not finding the NTLDR besides an OS problem. What happened immediately prior to not beind able to boot? Did the machine crash, lock up, power outage ect...

Speed

I dunno, I just figured that's what I did to make the error come up. Yea, my computer recognizes my drive. I'm not sure, I went into the cmos options and changed hdd to the first boot drive and the error still came up. Uhm, I installed winamp and foobar2000, then restarted. That's when I first got the error.

 

[DavidoFoo]

Originally posted by: theman
the only time thats happened to me is when i accenentally boot from a floppy thats in my drive. strange. i would just do a repair install of xp

I would do that, but I only have an XpHome disc right now.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: DavidoFoo

Originally posted by: theman
the only time thats happened to me is when i accenentally boot from a floppy thats in my drive. strange. i would just do a repair install of xp

I would do that, but I only have an XpHome disc right now.

Is XP Home that bad? Do you connect to a corporate domain, that you'd need XP Pro? At this point, it seems that one option would be to simply reinstall XP Home. If you don't have the XP Pro CD, and you don't have the administrator password to that installation, you could also simply install XP Home to another directory (say, C:\WinHome) and that would replace the required boot files and should allow you to boot.

 

[DavidoFoo]

I've found the boot.ini/ntldr/ntdetect.com files in a folder, but I can't move them to the root of c:
Any help?

 

[DavidoFoo]

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: DavidoFoo
I've found the boot.ini/ntldr/ntdetect.com files in a folder, but I can't move them to the root of c:
Any help?

Again, if you were to install XPHOME to, say, c:\xphome, that would allow you to boot and make any required changes (although that one step should cause XP Pro to start booting too.)

 

[nweaver]

I haven't tried a Knoppix LiveCD in a while, but NTFS write support is still considered buggy in 2.6 kernels, and I doubt that the generic livecd will have NTFS write support enabled.

 

[Smilin]

From XP recovery console:

Use "fixboot" to fix your boot files.

Use "map arc" to verify your arc pathing.

Use "bootcfg" to create or edit your boot.ini

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: Smilin
From XP recovery console:

Use "fixboot" to fix your boot files.

Use "map arc" to verify your arc pathing.

Use "bootcfg" to create or edit your boot.ini

He won't get that far if he doesn't know the admin password. Unfortunately, he doesn't.