Windows ntldr missing....

hey all

well my nephews DELL is a little messed up.

when you boot it up it says 'ntldr missing' 'prss crl+alt+del to restart' or something along those lines.

now the problem is, he needs the pc up and running QUICKLY and cant wait for a warranty return jobby, so is there any way to replace the ntldr file?

its running Windows XP home and its a Dimension 9100 (quite a nice machine)

what would be the procedure to do this? the major problem is that the main partition has been formatted with NTFS and not FAT so i cant access the I386 folder on C:, so i cant just go in there and copy the file over.

if anyone could help with this, would be a FANTASTIC help.

and yes, i know saying 'dell' over here is a crime! especially at a modding site! lol.

ta

 

I used to get that problem when overclocking my computer for some reason and had to underclock it slightly. Another time I think I used fixmbr in the windows repair console (you'll need the Windows CD).

 

say i had a xp pro cd, would that work with a xp home install?

 

for the fixmbr, I would imagine so. But your friend should have the oem cd with the computer. Or is it one of those that has the reinstall files integrated into the OS?

 

fixmbr, fixboot, and "chkdsk /p" are commands worth running in the Recovery Console for this sort of error.

 

make sure you dont have a floppy disk inserted at the time of boot.

if you still get the error, then windows has become corrupted. I think you can repair it using the xp cd.

 

Sorry if I sound super patronising but is there a floppy disk in the drive. Thats probably the most common cause of that message on boot.

 

Wouldn't that be the system disk error rather than the ntldr is missing error?

 

Like Wonka said "ntldr missing" only ever happened to me after overclocking too far.
Using the recovery console and then doing the fixmbr and fixboot routine would usually solve the problem, on the odd occasion a repair install was required.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=305595 have a look here. You can also get the ntldr error on a floppy disk but it may be a throwback to win2k cant recall seing it on XP

 

heya
well i popped my xp cd into his pc, and went on to try to install. it doesnt even find a partition on the drive! if i use my bootcd and use partition managed, it finds the partitions no problems.

HELP!

 

If it's under warranty, return it.

- H.

 

hmm......what if he has, shall we say....shared content on his computer, in the form of mp3's and dvds.......

 

Well, thats something we can't answer.

Looks like it could be a faulty hard drive, if xp can't find the partition there isn't a lot you can do (if it's sata, you'll need the drivers) although you might want to try moving the hdd to another sata/ide slot to see if that'll solve the problem, then try fixmbr.

Try using some recovery software to recover the data before returning the computer since the hdd is probably on its way out. Try booting with a bootable linux to see if it detects the hdd.

 

My brothers machine had this problem and the only way I could fix it was booting from a Linux live CD, mounting the partition and copying his data to a spare drive. Then I wiped the drive blank using one of the utils from the UBCD (ultimate boot CD) and started again.

I did try fixing it with the Windows CD but couldn't get to the recovery console or do a repair install.