[NNtonebone7]

My computer wont boot, i just had problems with Dr. watson... and i used this forum to fix it, the same day my computer crashed and restarted and went to a black screen and said Ntldr is missing press any key.. i have seen other people on here with the same problem, and i have read many different posts and directions how to fix the problem, and i have tried many of them. i have copied i386\ntdlr and i386\ntdetect.com to my hardrive from the windows xp cd. i have also done fixboot c, and that hasnt worked either. i cant start my computer in safe mode either, there is no option for it. i also tried the re-installing windows thing, where u pick an installation and press 'r' to repair it, but there were not installations to repair. i dont know what to do, i dont want to lose everything on my hard drive, please help. i am running windows xp pro, sp2. side note, i dont have a floppy drive. again, any help is greatly appreciated, thankyou

[Advertisements]

I had this. The only way I found to remedy it was to stick in the boot disk...

[alx]

I had this. The only way I found to remedy it was to stick in the boot disk...

[NNtonebone7]

yea, thats a problem for me because i dont have a floppy drive, do you think that i can somehome use an external floppy drive to boot from a disk?

[bmcpartland]

You can use an external floppy drive to boot, but you have to go into your bios settings and set it to boot to the device. When I do this on my laptops, I have to choose USB external device (it's a USB external floppy) to boot to first.

[jsmain]

I've seen that same error with XP pro. I'm dealing with it currently. My problem stems from sending the system into standby or hibernation however. When it comes back, it corrupts the drive, and requires a re install of XP. I've only had this problem with this machine while it was running Pro OEM. I have a copy on Home that I installed last night , and I don't seem to have standby or hibernation option at this time. I'll look at the hibernation settings, as I do want to see if it will do this under home as well. If so, I'll be moving pro to a different system anyhow.

[NNtonebone7]

i still havent been able to fix this problem, but i havent been able to get an extenal floppy drive and try to boot with a boot disk. but is there anyway to get my files like my pictures and songs off of my computer without being able to boot to windows?

[jsmain]

I can only suggest creating an image of the partition using Drive image or Ghost, to another drive, then format, reload windows, then using the image explorer of your partitioning software, extract them back to the fresh system.

[phoneman38703]

I'm currently having this problem on my son's pc. I've read dozens of threads and so far this is the best I've been able to come up with so far. Use a different PC with the same OS that yours has, and format a disk. Search for and copy to the floppy the following files: NTDETECT.COM, NTLDR, and BOOT.INI For boot.ini to work, the second PC needs to have the same basic hard drive type (IDE, etc). Goto this MS link for more detail http://support.micro...kb;en-us;325879
After I created this disk I can get my PC to boot up normally and XP seems to work fine. UNTIL I try to reboot then back to NTLDR missing. Good luck!

[jimithegeek]

I also had this NTLDR Missing message and fixed it fairly quickly as I had just gone through a HDD crash 3 weeks previously.
My problem, and I suspect others will be the same, was the boot.ini file. For some reason it was corrupted even though I run Norton anti virus.
To fix use your windows install cd and go init repair mode - option R and execute bootcfg program. You can also use a bootble floppy to view/edit this file.
My guess is windows uses the boot.ini to determine which OS to load and where to load it from i.e. partition #.
Look at the OS load options using bootcfg /query
the result will look something like this. This is for 1 OS there would be a boot entry id 2 if there was 2... etc..
Boot Loader Settings
--------------------
timeout: 30
default: multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

Boot Entries
------------
Boot entry ID: 1
Friendly Name: "Microsoft Windows XP Professional"
Path: multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
OS Load Options: /fastdetect /debug /debugport=com1:

It could be the partition is wrong and its trying to load windows from another partition or a non existent partition. It's usually (1) on the C: drive where Windows is installed.
If there is garbage you can bootcfg /rebuild - i had this option but can't find it on MS web site http://www.microsoft...us/bootcfg.mspx
Use bootcfg /? for options.
You can edit the boot.ini file with Notepad or DOS editor to fix.
Hope this helps