XP Pro disk

[wombil]

Helloooo.
A friend has copied his XP pro disk for me and I want to do a clean install on a PC with XP pro installed and its own coa number but freezing and going toooo sloooow.When I try to run the disk the message I get is ,"Missing ntldr,press cntrl alt del to restart."
I have downloaded ntldr from MS download to floppy but question is can I copy it to the xp installation disk,and how? It would take a week or more to get the disk copied again.
Thanks for any help

[Paul Komski]

The message "ntldr is missing" comes from a boot sector somewhere - even from a partition on the hard drive - and usually means that it cannot be reached rather than it is actually missing.

Suggest you detach the hard drive temporarily and see if you can boot to the CD to check that it will boot OK. If so then try wiping/zeroing the hard drive (data backed up first of course as necessary) with DBAN/CopyWipe/etc and then retry. If still no good then it is beg/borrow/copy another CD time unless you can access the CD from a DOS boot floppy that contains smartdrv and then run smartdrv followed by running the winnt.exe file in the i386 directory on the installation CD.

Another approach is to see if you can boot (all be it slowly) to the Windows installation, insert the CD and then from Windows run the winnt32.exe file from the same i386 folder.

[wombil]

Thanks mate,will give this a try later.Bit pushed for time right now.