NTLDR is missing, unless there's a bootable CD in the tray

[yukichigai]

My system HD crashed a while ago (I should have been clued in when the max sustained speed dropped to .7Mbit) and I was forced to reinstall XP x64. No big, I'd actually been meaning to do it for a while, but something weird happened once I finished the install and rebooted for the first time: The bootup sequence checked both my CD drives for bootable discs, (normal) then told me that NTLDR was missing and instructed me to press ctrl+alt+delete. (not normal) I did this a few times and finally gave up, stuck in my x64 CD and was going to boot into the recovery console when something distracted me. (The cat, actually) I missed hitting enter to load the CD, but oddly enough the computer booted just fine.

I don't know what's going on exactly, but so long as I have a bootable (but not auto-booting) CD in one of my drives the computer boots up fine. However, as soon as I take the CD out I get the NTLDR error.

Yes, I have multiple hard disks, both IDE and SATA. The boot order is set properly, and the system HD is showing up as the master.

Any ideas?

P.S. Weird, huh?

 

[Penth]

What is your boot order set to in the bios. My friend had this problem and I just made sure his hard drive was in the boot order (he had replaced HD with CD-ROM to reinstall) and it was fixed.

 

[unmerited]

It's possible NTLDR never got installed to your HD, make sure it's in the root directory of your boot drive.


unmerited

 

[Cdeck]

most likely you changed drive letters. select "repair using the recovery console" option on the xp cd and type:

fixboot <enter>
fixmbr <enter>

exit and reboot computer.

 

[Hav0k99]

Originally posted by: Cdeck
most likely you changed drive letters. select "repair using the recovery console" option on the xp cd and type:

fixboot <enter>
fixmbr <enter>

exit and reboot computer.

Yep this should fix it!

 

[yukichigai]

Originally posted by: Cdeck
most likely you changed drive letters. select "repair using the recovery console" option on the xp cd and type:

fixboot <enter>
fixmbr <enter>

exit and reboot computer.

Yeah, I did change some drive letters as it turns out, just not the letter of the system partition. I'll try this and see if that fixes it.

On a vaguely related (but not important now that I've reinstalled x64) note, what possible reason would XP x64 say that ntoskrnl.exe is missing, even if its present on the hard drive?