NTLDR missing...How would I fix this problem?

[MournSanity]

Okay here's the deal. I have two hard drives. one hard drive had 2 NTFS partitions on it, C and D. The other hard drive is drive F, which is what I use all the time and run Windows off of. I decided to partition my drive and merge C with D. I run partition magic and it ruins my working partition, F. Now I can't boot up into my Windows XP because it gives me the error message "NTLDR Missing Ctrl+Alt+Dlt to reboot." If I try to insert a Windows XP boot disk to fix it, it says to me that my hal.dll is missing. I presume that NTLDR is the Windows NT Loader, the black screen that pops up when I turn my system and select an operating system.

How would I go about fixing this? I really need to get to my F drive because it has all my files in it and I can't get them back because when I put the hard drive in another PC I am denied access. Does anybody have any ideas or has experienced this problem? Is this a hardware problem? Most likely not, because Partition Magic caused it, but whatever.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Sid59]

that's terrible, i had a simialar problem. i had my NTFS XP install on "F" because i was too lazy to fix it around. Then, one of my hard drives with a drive letter "E" crashed and died. since the bios / os no longer read the dead hard drive, all the drive letters dropped by 1 less letter. No matter what i tried, i couldn't boot into that windows install. I tried the XP Repair Option - FIXMBR and FIXBOOT - that didn't help at all.

few solutions

- install XP on a master drive without the hard drive with your old OS
-- attach the old hdd as slave and backup the files

** i used a ghost image to try and image the os to another partition but that didn't work. admittingly, i didn't try very hard.
-- i ended up saving the ghost image to a partition and reloaded windows.
i used GHOSTEXP to open the ghost image and i extracted and saved all the files - email, documents, etc.

 

[rallyrulz]

Yea this happened to me when i had stuffed my 2k OS. Never did get that one back working. Just in case you dont get this fixed, a few things ive learned to do. 1. Change the directory of my documents to 'another' partition or drive, and store all your docs there. Makes life easy to back up and dont matter how many times winblows looses it, youll never loose your stuff. 2. Get another working pc, put the hard drive in there as slave, and retireve all your files that way, should be ok.

To actually fix the problem if it were possible, you basically need the cd to run, then go install new copy, then repair (not repair when it first says, only the 2nd time it asks, strange i know but its ms afterall). Make sure there are no floppy disks in there, im sure youve checked that through. The final thing is get an fdisk (windows 9x boot disk), and load off that, then at the cmd prompt, type 'fdisk /mbr' cant remember what slash but ull get it, and that rewrites the master boot record, which may actually fix this problem.

Good luck, and lets never trust ms.