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NTLDR is missing?

I

igloo15

Senior member
OK it recognizes my hard drives my cpu my ram everything I think but everytime it goes to the verifying DMI pool data it comes back with this message that says NTLDR is missing Press Ctrl+alt+del to restart. I am like crap what the hell. My system is as follows. Amd 64 3000, ddr400 1 gig, 6800gt, 2 hard drives, 3 optical, and a themaltake 480 psu. Plz if anyone nows whats wrong plz tell me I have thought about the possiblity that I may have mixed up the ide channels from what they were on my old mobo will that affect anything.
 
It's not your hardware. It's the OS. NTLDR is one of the critical files for NT (4, XP, 2000, etc.) to boot. Need to reinstall the OS, or sometimes you can run a repair. But it's just a software problem.
 
What was the last thing you did (when it was working)? If you've played with partitions or mucked around with another OS, chances are thae the boot loader is now looking in the wrong place for NTLDR and related files.

If you have your Windows install CD, you can boot off of it and repair the bootsector.

-SUO
 
When I first had the computer I put the harddrive with my os on one of the onboard ide's now i have it on my pci controller and another harddrive without the os on it is in its slot. Could that be the problem
 
This can sometimes also be caused by having a non bootable floppy in the drive, so watch out for that, + moving the boot drive to an external card w/out loading drivers and replacing the drive with another on the onboard controler will definitly cause this problem unless you edit the boot ini and load drivers for your IDE card before moving the driver. Hope this help... 🙂
 
hmm now it doesn't say that but just hangs at verifying DMI Pool Data Since I might of changed the ide's of my other devices around will that also affect this.
 
Well, if you changed motherboards, you will need to either reinstall windows or change the motherboard drivers in the windows installation to the standard ones in order for the system to work.
 
I didn't change mobo's but it maybe a revised bios and the ide's for the optical drive are different. If it comes down to it I will reinstall windows but hopeful i won't have to. My mobo is vnf3-250
 
Originally posted by: igloo15
When I first had the computer I put the harddrive with my os on one of the onboard ide's now i have it on my pci controller and another harddrive without the os on it is in its slot. Could that be the problem
Click to expand...

If the HD with the installed OS has now been moved to an IDE channel on the PCI IDE controller, then you need to change your BIOS settings to tell it to boot off of the PCI IDE controller card, and not the mobo IDE channels.

The fact that it gets as far as telling you that NTLDR is not found, seems to indicate that you might have done that already, since it IS apparently loading the MBR from whatever drive is set to boot in the BIOS.

I would double-check the BOOT.INI settings, and make sure that the BOOT.INI, NTLDR, NTDETECT files are all on that same boot drive, and that the BOOT.INI file properly references the drive and partition that the OS files are installed onto.

Assuming that nothing else is the problem, then you could boot your OS CD, start the Recovery Console, and from there, run the "fixboot" command. I think that should work in this case.
 
sounds like maybe you need to re-enter the bios, let it redetect your drives as you now have them configured. Make sure the hard drive with the OS is the master and the other is the slave. keep your hard drive on ide port 1 and your cd's on your secondary port. If that all checks out, then you will need to boot from your original media and either do a repair or reinstall.
 
Hold on. There should be a very simple fix here. Let me get this all straight first though.

1) Computer was working
2) Added PCI based IDE controller card
3) Hooked OS Hard drive to controller hard.
4) Added a different HD as primay master on motherboard (where OS hard drive was before)
5) System doesn't boot

There are 2 things you need to fix this situation.
1) Your OS needs drivers for that PCI controller card.
2) You need to tell your BIOS to boot off of SCSI/add in card/ etc and NOT off of the HD you added.

First off, change back to the old settings. Put your OS HD plugged into the motherboard where it was before. Unplug the new one completely. LEAVE the controller card in!

When windows boots up again (as it should, if you put everything back the way it was) it will find that controller card. Install the drivers for it, or let windows automatically add them.

After it's done, shut down again and move the OS hard drive to the controller card. Then go into BIOS and change it to boot off of that card. See if you can boot into the OS then. If it works, add that other HD.
 
Originally posted by: igloo15
When I first had the computer I put the harddrive with my os on one of the onboard ide's now i have it on my pci controller and another harddrive without the os on it is in its slot. Could that be the problem
Click to expand...


I missed that you added in a pci card. If you can put everything back the way you had it and it works then obviously the pci card is not going to work yet. Have to agree with sideswipe😉
 
No i have 2 hard drives one connects to a pci card and another the one with the os on it connects to the onboard ide controller. My mobo messed up so I had to buy a new one. I got it today but I think I messed up where the ide controllers used to connect to for example. I have 5 drives 2 hard drives 3 optical. I have 4 ata controllers to connect too. On my old motherboard I had them set a certian way so that 2 optical and 1 harddrive connected to the two onboard ide controllers. I have 1 optical and 1 harddrive on the pci controller. Its always been this way but now with the new mobo I think I mixed up where I connected the ide cables.
 
OK if I understand correctly, just set up your primary hard drive with the operating system as master on the first IDE port and leave all other drives disconnected. Boot and see if the OS at least starts to load. Unless your new motherboard is "identical" to your old one, you should do a clean install of everything, in my opinion, but the way to find out if you really have an issue is to connect only the bootable drive first and then start adding them back from there one by one with a boot in between until you find out what the issue is.
 
Basically make sure your OS drive is on the mobo and not attached to RAID IDE ports.....If the drivers were not installed when you installed the system, you're in a world of trouble
 
Well you should be able to set up the hard drive on the onboard IDE device boot up with controller card in and install drivers for the card in the OS. reboot and change your hardrives to the pci card, and if you have your bios configured correctly, it should boot correctly. Hust make sure you have your boot device set correctly in BIOS.
 
Follow what Sideswipe said first.

You need to boot from the HD (w/ the OS on it) connected to the motherboard WITH the PCI card installed, but with no drives connected to it. This way, Windows will detect the card and install the driver for it. Then shut down, change the IDE cable from the MB to the PCI card.

Reboot and enter the BIOS and change the boot device to "SCSI card" (or whatever is similar in your BIOS). This tells the BIOS to boot from "HDD 0" on the PCI card.

If you don't do this, the BIOS may try to boot from "HDD 0" (usually the default drive) which it assumes is on the motherboard controller. If you have a data drive (w/ no OS on it) connected to the MB controller, the BIOS will return the "NTLDR missing" error.

BTW, I've also seen this error when overclocking to much. FWIW, I wouldn't recommend connecting CD/DVD-ROM drives to a PCI HD controller card. Keep them on the MB controller...YMMV
 
Originally posted by: Boobers
Follow what Sideswipe said first.

You need to boot from the HD (w/ the OS on it) connected to the motherboard WITH the PCI card installed, but with no drives connected to it. This way, Windows will detect the card and install the driver for it. Then shut down, change the IDE cable from the MB to the PCI card.

Reboot and enter the BIOS and change the boot device to "SCSI card" (or whatever is similar in your BIOS). This tells the BIOS to boot from "HDD 0" on the PCI card.

If you don't do this, the BIOS may try to boot from "HDD 0" (usually the default drive) which it assumes is on the motherboard controller. If you have a data drive (w/ no OS on it) connected to the MB controller, the BIOS will return the "NTLDR missing" error.

BTW, I've also seen this error when overclocking to much. FWIW, I wouldn't recommend connecting CD/DVD-ROM drives to a PCI HD controller card. Keep them on the MB controller...YMMV
Click to expand...

I had something similar happen when I swapped motherboards. I had my OS boot HDD as master on IDE channel 1, a data HDD as slave on IDE channel 1, a data HDD as master on IDE channel 2 and a CD-R as slave on IDE channel 2. When it would try and boot up, I got the "NTLDR is missing" msg. CMOS saw all drives in the order listed above. After swapping IDE cables and even putting back old MB, still no go. I even tried setting 1st boot device to CD, boot using WinXP cd, did repair, then copied NTLDR & NTDETECT, still no go.

Then duh, finally tried changing 3rd boot device from the default of IDE-0 to IDE-1 (nope), then IDE-2 and voila, it came to life.

Question, what determines which drive is IDE-0, IDE-1...? I do have the primary master HDD on IDE channel 1 on MB and HDD jumper set to master. Anyway it works.
 
go into the command line mode for the repair and use fixboot. that shoudl take care fo your problem right away.
 
Hi, I don't know what OS you are trying to load, so can't be sure about this. One trick to get around this problem was to create a file named NTLDR with nothing in it except a CR. That fooled the OS into thinking that the file it wanted was there. Jim
 
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