ntldr problem

[Randy]

Help!!!! I have window xp and my pc won't start. It says NTLDR is missing. what is this and what can I do to repair it. I just put in a rack that I can take my hard drive in and out and I took it out to put a old hard drive in and put this one back in and it has this error message NTLDR is missing. none of my diagnostic tools work in Dos. help me please. It also recognize my hard drive in the bios under auto and user so I don't know what happened. thanks for any help and info on this

[YODA74]

you can proboly fix that thru the recovery console "fixboot"

or boot and choose "last known good configuration"
Try booting from the xp cd and run repair

is this an upgrade? did you go overW/98?

you usually don't get this error unless you've Installed Windows XP Over Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows Millennium Edition??

some info on why and what you have done lately might help.

or if it is a 98 upgrade Try to Boot the computer with a Windows 95 or Windows 98 Startup diskette or another bootable diskette with sys.com on it.
At the A:\> prompt type:

sys c: <press enter>


After pressing enter you should receive the prompt "System Transferred". Once the file system has been transferred reboot the computer without the diskette and attempt to reproduce the error.

[Randy]

Thanks for the reply, I tried to using sys c: using win 98 bootdisk but it said it could not find the sector???????? I tried again using the boot disk and now ith says I do not have a valid fat. it does not let me go to the menu in xp for menu options. I install xp over window 98. What I did lately was installed a rack so I can take my hard drive to school with me and use it there with there pc and so I could use it at home also. It seem to work fine but I had an old emachine so I put that hard drive in the rack and tried to use it to see what was on it but it would not get psst the win 98 logo I tried changing the hard drive configuration in the bios to reflect the emachine hard drive to what is was but it did not work so I gave up.. I put my original hard drive that has xp back in the rack and put it in my pc and got the ntldr message. I believe the hard drive configuration is correct. that is pretty much what I did before it was working. Sorry to write a novel about this but letting you know what I have done. Any suggestion is appreciated. Oh the pain

[mjc]

1. DOS tools will not work on an NTFS drive.....and what you said about not finding the sector I would say that is what you are looking at.

2. Set the BIOS options to autodetect, don't set them manually an "think" you have them correct.......

[YODA74]

Hmm I've about run out of idea's Make sure the Cables are correct and secure seems you have been doing some work on it.

Put the xp cd in and see if it will boot to that?? someone else might have a few more suggestions.

[Ghost_Hacker]

MJC's and Yoda's suggestions should get you back up and running. (when you boot to the xp cd choose the "repair" option.)

This link should help:


XP repair options (http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_xp.htm) click on the "how to run a repair install" link.


It sounds to me as if your drive may be damaged, possibly by moving it from pc to pc. Hopefully, I'm wrong. :)


Good Luck :)

[Randy]

Thanks for all the replies and help, I have window xp professional does it boot from that or do I have to so some special kind of task. ( what I mean do I just put it in the pc and let it boot I tried that but nothing happened) also I have a new hard drive I just bought because it was on special 60g for $70 bucks maxtor at Fry's electronic but I want to know if I put in a new hard drive and Os is there a way to transer the files in (My documents )only or the utilites only transfer everything I have on the old hard drive. I just have 2 old drive that I have info in (My document) I would like to transfer. Thanks for all the replies and once again Oh What Pain!!!

[pekay]

From the symptoms you reported it sounds like you have a single partition on your hard drive and/or have applied XP Service Pack.
Your CD disk should boot, however you must set up the BIOS to boot from your CD-ROM drive. That should then auto run and start the installation.
If you partition the drive so that the primary partition is less than
7.5 Gigabytes it will assure that the ntldr.exe file is in the correct place to boot.
Hope this helps

Pekay