BouncingSoul

Everytime I reboot I'm told NTLDR is missing, press ctrl alt yadda yadda.

I've done the repair console procedure listed here

NTLDR is missing

But it still won't work. I went to reinstall windows, booted from the cd but forgot to press a key to actually start the boot process. My system then booted from the hdd normally. I can handle leaving the cd in the drive, its a minor inconvenience, but if possible, I'd love a fix to this situation.

---

Android412

Causes:

1. Computer is booting from a non-bootable source.
2. Computer hard disk drive is not properly setup in BIOS.
3. Corrupt NTLDR and/or NTDETECT.COM file.
4. Misconfiguration with the boot.ini file.
5. Attempting to upgrade from a Windows 95, 98, or ME computer that is using FAT32.
6. New hard disk drive being added.
7. Corrupt boot sector / master boot record.
8. Seriously corrupted version of Windows 2000 or Windows XP.
9. Loose or Faulty IDE/EIDE hard disk drive cable.
10. Failing to enable USB keyboard support in the BIOS.

This was my problem when I got this error. I have an PCI card to add 2 more PATA slots, and when I moved my tower, I guess something flexed enough so it didn't sit right in the PCI slot, resulting in the error.

It's happened once or twice since then, I just kinda wiggle the card and it usually boots right up.

Triple check all your connections, and try hooking up just the boot drive, if no luck, swap cable try again.

Hope you figure it out, took my a couple frustrating hours.

Android412

roirraW "edor" ehT

Do you have multiple quantity and/or types of hard drives in this system? SATA and PATA? The reason I ask is because I have SATA and PATA drives, and the BIOS set up correctly to boot from the SATA drive, but if I leave a Windows boot CD in the drive by accident and then ignore "Press any key to boot...", the computer then tries to boot from the PATA drive which won't work because I only have data on them, so I thought perhaps this is what's happening to you only that maybe in your case the easiest fix would be to set the BIOS to boot from the PATA drive instead.

---

BouncingSoul

All my drives are SATA and all the connections are solid. For right now I'm just leaving the cd in the drive. When I get some free time I'm going to back up everything and do a complete reformat.

---

roirraW "edor" ehT

It must've installed the NTLDR on a different SATA drive then. In your BIOS if you configure it to boot from the other SATA drive then all should be fine. No reformat would probably be necessary, and in fact a reformat might just recreate the same problem, since it might just reinstall the NTLDR on the second SATA drive.

---

Narmo

Had to register just to thank you for this I had problems with my XP earlier and had to keep additional ntldr, boot.ini & other stuff on my IDE disk, since the system wouldn't boot directly from SATA (maybe this would have been the simplest solution for that problem, too? ). I hadn't had any problems with SATA disks while running Vista, so I thought that Win 7 would be able to handle it, if I just remove all the bootloader files from the IDE disk, format the SATA and install windows normally. However, I was about to have a stroke when the same old "NTLDR is missing" error appeared once again... Since I hear that Win 7 doesn't really use NTLDR, I wasn't sure if the same error console tinkering would work. Anyways, it seems that the fix was simpler than it seemed, cheers m8

roirraW "edor" ehT

Cool! You're welcome and thank you! On my old system I had resorted to that (keeping the bootloader files on the PATA drive too) because even though in that system's BIOS I could (and had before) have the SATA RAID drives set to be booted from, eventually I think I accidentally did something to the PATA drive and after that point I started having the problem (when reinstalling XP for example) that when ignoring the bootable installation CD, it would try to boot from the PATA drive.

Glad I could help.

---

Nuadormrac

OK, the question to first ask yourself is if it ever booted normally off the HD. If yes, it's possible the file got deleted accidently, somehow. In this case, manually copying the file back will fix this. The CD, for it's own boot from CD option, does have the necessary boot loader, to continue.

Incidently, and as an aside, I used to have a backup floppy, when such things were still in use which had a copy of the boot loader. If anything happened on the HDD, then the floppy could be used to boot up the NT 4 machine. Same will work with win2k, XP, Vista, essentially any OS using the same sort of boot loader (just with the boot loader to it's system).

If the answer is no, then as a former post mentioned, the BIOS might be linking to a different boot drive. In this case, set the BIOS to boot from whichever driver has the boot loader on it. Either could happen however, the BIOS mis-linking, or a file got wiped somehow... If the BIOS is correct however, perhaps someone could mail it to you, else you can manually copy it off the CD to the proper location yourself. I seem to remember running into something similar when I setup a multi-boot with Linux, and after Lilo got setup, ntldr disappeared. Had to copy it over from inside Linux, which I was able to do due to the boot floppy I had made.