Can't start up after XP reinstall

[kj21]

Hi. First off, thanks for all on this site. I've gotten much help here in the past.

OK, Reinstalled WinXP on newly formatted HD on my AthalonXP 1800+ system. Worked ok, but I couldn't get online (Road Runner cable modem. More on that later). I reinstalled XP, and got an error message "couldn't find ________ files", install aborted. Sorry, didn't write missing files names down. Tried to restart, but at bottup I get "NTLDR is missing, press ctl+alt+del. Can't get past this. This thread (http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=35454&highlight=ntldr) adresses the NTLDR issue, but I've tried changing first boot device in BIOS, and with and without WinXP startup CD in the drive. Still can't get it going.

If nothing else I would like to simply be able to start up from the CD and re-reinstall, but I'm not sure how to do that. Any insight on this would be great.

Also, after a fresh install, my cable modem should get me right online (according to Road Ruuner tech sup). It's all dynamic ip I guess. They can see my modem and ping it, but that's about it. In my device mngr, my ethernet card seems ok, but I get a "?" on the ethernet controller device. Any ideas here?

Sorry for posting 2 probs in one thread, obviously I'm more worrid about getting comp up and running.

Thanks for your time and help.

-Keith

[Paul Komski]

You reinstalled WinXP onto a newly formatted HD and later reinstalled XP again - at which point you started getting error messages. Hope I got that bit right.

How did you attempt the second reinstall? By booting to the CDROM or directly from within Windows or some other way?

You can either start over by deleting all the partitions and then boot to the WinXP installation CD or attempt a repair installation as per http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm or simply try to edit boot.ini either directly or from the recovery console using bootcfg /rebuild

[kj21]

You reinstalled WinXP onto a newly formatted HD and later reinstalled XP again - at which point you started getting error messages. Hope I got that bit right.



Thanks for the reply Paul. Yep, you got it right. After a few tries I was able to get it to boot from the CD and do a full reinstall. It's finishing up now. We'll see how it works out.