[gigamesh]

My computer won't boot. It goes to 'NTLDR missing'. Here is the full story:

I was trying to reinstall Windows on a drive that I think became infected with malware. The installation kept freezing half way through the process so I thought the drive might be going bad and bought a new one. I installed XP on the new drive (which became 'K:'). At this point, I would have 2 options when booting up, even though the install on the C drive wasn't working. After awhile of using the new boot, I noticed my drives weren't showing up in disk management, even though everything seemed to be working fine and they were displayed in My Computer. I posted on another forum for help and it was suggested that I install this program on the K drive while the C was disconnected: http://gag.sourceforge.net/

I did that but it didn't help, so then someone suggested I use Windows Recovery Console to try to fix the new boot drive (I'm assuming so that its letter would change to 'C' and be the master boot). So I did 'fixboot', 'fixmbr', as well as the GAG program linked above, checking to see if it would boot after each step. None worked, and now I can't get past 'NTLDR missing'. It seems the Recovery Console commands screwed up something on the new drive.

Any help would be much appreciated! thanks

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GAG doesn't need its own partition. It installs itself in the first track of the hard disk, wich is reserved for these kinds of programs

there is where your problem started...
The XP MBR (master boot record) is located on the first 512 bytes (first sector) of the hard drive. It contains the code necessary to read the partition table and then loads the boot sector of the active partition. The active partition's boot sector contains the code necessary to load the kernel of whatever OS resides on that partition....
so when you installed GAG, THE GRAPHICAL BOOT MANAGER...it over wrote the xp MBR...
I have to leave now but if no one helps you this afternoon I will in the morning

[happyrock]

GAG doesn't need its own partition. It installs itself in the first track of the hard disk, wich is reserved for these kinds of programs

there is where your problem started...
The XP MBR (master boot record) is located on the first 512 bytes (first sector) of the hard drive. It contains the code necessary to read the partition table and then loads the boot sector of the active partition. The active partition's boot sector contains the code necessary to load the kernel of whatever OS resides on that partition....
so when you installed GAG, THE GRAPHICAL BOOT MANAGER...it over wrote the xp MBR...
I have to leave now but if no one helps you this afternoon I will in the morning

[gigamesh]

thanks for the help, however I decided to just start from scratch and overwrite the new drive with a completely fresh install and reassign it as the master boot. Everything seems to be fine now.

[happyrock]

your welcome...and thanks for letting us know...