Alright here's the setup :
I came home from work, turned on my monitor, the cursor moved around but wouldn't click on anything, so I rebooted. After post I was greeted with
DISK BOOT FAILURE - INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER
I pressed enter and it popped up again. Then I pressed enter again..... and Windows XP loaded
So that threw me off. But I knew something wasn't right so I ran through google looking around, eventually gave up, tried rebooting, then I got
NTLDR is Missing
CTRL + ALT + DEL TO REBOOT
I've seen that message a few times in my computer career, but never right after a disk boot failure. A few things came to mind to check, heat problems, faulty disk, fragmentation, master boot record, etc
I put a huge box fan on my case, that dropped temps down to around 70F, which is perfectly acceptable. I found out that putting in my XP Boot CD I had made a while back, would cause "Press any key to boot from CD" to popup, and if I didn't press anything, it would actually bypass the NTLDR message and let me choose which partition to boot from, so I tried loading my supposed 'damaged' windows. I defragged both HD's (which only contain one partition each), did a scheduled error check on both drives (for good measure), went to recovery console, did a FIXMBR and a FIXBOOT, reinstalled windows, put windows on an entirely different HD, ran a complete virus scan, and the message still comes up. And it comes up fast, like before the HD even reads really. Soon as the post screen flashes away, boom, NTLDR is missing. I also checked to see if my BIOS had the right boot order, it did. I also checked to make sure that the battery wasn't dead, and it was fine, date still shows on BIOS.
So i'm pretty much stumped, the only thing I haven't ruled out is a memory resident virus, or something of that sort. I would appreciate some more heads on this, I can get into windows, but I don't want to have to leave my boot CD in just to use windows.
-Aaron-
I came home from work, turned on my monitor, the cursor moved around but wouldn't click on anything, so I rebooted. After post I was greeted with
DISK BOOT FAILURE - INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER
I pressed enter and it popped up again. Then I pressed enter again..... and Windows XP loaded
So that threw me off. But I knew something wasn't right so I ran through google looking around, eventually gave up, tried rebooting, then I got
NTLDR is Missing
CTRL + ALT + DEL TO REBOOT
I've seen that message a few times in my computer career, but never right after a disk boot failure. A few things came to mind to check, heat problems, faulty disk, fragmentation, master boot record, etc
I put a huge box fan on my case, that dropped temps down to around 70F, which is perfectly acceptable. I found out that putting in my XP Boot CD I had made a while back, would cause "Press any key to boot from CD" to popup, and if I didn't press anything, it would actually bypass the NTLDR message and let me choose which partition to boot from, so I tried loading my supposed 'damaged' windows. I defragged both HD's (which only contain one partition each), did a scheduled error check on both drives (for good measure), went to recovery console, did a FIXMBR and a FIXBOOT, reinstalled windows, put windows on an entirely different HD, ran a complete virus scan, and the message still comes up. And it comes up fast, like before the HD even reads really. Soon as the post screen flashes away, boom, NTLDR is missing. I also checked to see if my BIOS had the right boot order, it did. I also checked to make sure that the battery wasn't dead, and it was fine, date still shows on BIOS.
So i'm pretty much stumped, the only thing I haven't ruled out is a memory resident virus, or something of that sort. I would appreciate some more heads on this, I can get into windows, but I don't want to have to leave my boot CD in just to use windows.
-Aaron-