NTLDR Missing, Can't Boot, Repair Install Doesn't Work!

[Rainsford]

I rebooted my computer yesterday, and when it gets to the part where it boots up Windows XP, I get this error "NTLDR Missing, Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to reboot". I immediatly went to the AT Forums and found a lot of threads on NTLDR problems, but none of the suggestions seemed to fix my problem. I tried a repair install, nothing. I checked to make sure I wasn't trying to boot off of a floppy, nothing (my computer is only set to boot off of my IDE drive anyways). I started the recovery console in Windows XP install after booting off of the CD, and I can fixmbr and fixboot. Neither of them helped. The weird thing was that I could see all my files, so I know the hard drive is at least partially working, and I could see a file in my c:\ directory called ntldr. I assume that that is the file that I'm "missing", so I found that a little weird. Just for kicks I deleted the file and ran the repair install again, and the ntldr file was replaced, but I'm still having the same boot problem. I'm out of ideas, any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot, I'm sure the rest of you people have some idea, I'm sure it's obvious and I'm just missing it.

 

[rockhard]

Have you tried opening up your boot.ini in a text editor to see if the config for which HD partition etc your OS boots from is the same as the "default" listed within?
If theyre listed different that may be your problem.
they should be (0), (0), (0), (1) by the way you explain your config.

Hope this helps,

rockhard =)

 

[Rainsford]

My boot.ini file looks fine to me, so I wonder what else it could be.

 

[Rainsford]

Hmm, well here's some more stuff. I copied NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM from the CD onto a floppy and I also created a BOOT.INI file on the floppy and put the same information that's in my BOOT.INI file on my hard drive into the file on the foppy. Then I told my computer to boot from the floppy and Windows XP started right up. Then I copied the three files on the floppy to my hard drive and rebooted, this time booting from the hard drive. Still got the NTLDR missing error. What's up with that? The files are obviously fine, does this sound like a corrupt hard drive problem? I thought it might be but Windows runs fine after I boot off of the floppy.

 

[kyoshozx]

Hmmmm... well before your computer had that problem what changes have you done to it? any changes to file permissions?

 

[Rainsford]

No changes that I remember making, and that's what's also weird. I didn't do anything between this reboot and the last.

 

[FuManStan]

I had this same problem installing Windows XP on my friends computer. We tried installing it on 2 different hard drives with fresh formats and it kept coming up with this error so he ended up settling for Windows 98.

 

[Rainsford]

Well, I reinstalled Windows XP and it seems to work now, too bad I had to reinstall though

 

[NogginBoink]

<< Hmm, well here's some more stuff. I copied NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM from the CD onto a floppy and I also created a BOOT.INI file on the floppy and put the same information that's in my BOOT.INI file on my hard drive into the file on the foppy. Then I told my computer to boot from the floppy and Windows XP started right up. Then I copied the three files on the floppy to my hard drive and rebooted, this time booting from the hard drive. Still got the NTLDR missing error. What's up with that? The files are obviously fine, does this sound like a corrupt hard drive problem? >>



It could also be that the active partition on the drive was changed to a partition that was formatted NTFS but did not have an OS on it.