I cannot boot - NTLDR missing?

[ptitterington]

Im sure its to do with the drive letter changing.
Having spent 7hrs reinstalling everything I dont want to do it again if i dont need to.
This is what I have done, Please let me know if I have not messed it up too much to save.

I have 2 hard drives and as per a previous post Iremoved my dual boot and formatted the smaller hd for my system. Because I still had info and an os on the larger HD, I ended up with My system HD as D and my scratch disk as C.

Everything was working perfectly, I had put in sp1 and all latest drivers and was happy. I transferred the last of my info from C and tried to format it.(the right click option way.) this failed.
As i had partition magic 7 I formatted it with this, intending to use drive mapper if i needed to.The format was successful and required a reboot.

I rebooted but got the warning that NTLDR was missing, I changed the boot sequence but with same result.
I booted to the recovery consol and tried boot repair without success.

So I setup a new install of xp but named it windows2 to prevent deletion of my good os and files.

I can boot fine and can see my progs etc but I dont know how to use them.
I used partition magic drive mapper to change all references of D to C but this has not helped.
Is there a way now to get rid of the new OS and let the other work.
If not can I transfer all my settings and then delete the Old windows folder.

Any help really appreciated as I am using my kids machine.

 

[ptitterington]

I guess its not so easy.....

Oh well start again at least itll be all shiny and new,

:dead:

 

[StormBringer]

Only thing I can think of is to try to recover the data from one of the disks, then format that disk and partition it, then add the other disk and get your data off it before formatting it as well. Then you should set your partitions up like I have suggested in many posts before, one for OS, one for data, one for games, etc... so this doesn't happen again.

There are a couple of other things you might try but they would be just as involved. As for the cause, I'm unsure but it sounds like it may be because of the way PM does things, it actually does the formatting or partitioning, moving, etc.. upon reboot and not in XP. The system was probably still looking to the other disk for the OS which was no longer there. I think there may be some holes in that theory but it is the best I can come up with from what you said.

 

[ptitterington]

A lot of this trouble started with removing my dual boot and additional system, I had what you said, Xp home for work on 1 partition, 98se for games and applications that would not work and a backup with xp pro on it. I have things more organised now and needed space for video.

Most of the trouble I think was caused by believing blindly in the magical powers of Partition Magic.

Anyway its all sorted bar the not saved settings for word and my address book.

 

[cobrabird]

Issue:

NTLDR is Missing.

Additional Information:

From the Computer Hope Dictionary:

Short for NT loader, NTLDR is a program loaded from the hard drive boot sector that displays the Microsoft Windows NT startup menu and helps Microsoft Windows NT load.

Cause:

Systems hard disk drive has FAT32 file system.
Computer hard disk drive has INT-13 extensions with a system-ID type of 0C in the partition table
The heads value in the FAT32 BIOS Pattern Block (BPB) is inaccurate.
Solutions:

To resolve the error message "NTLDR is Missing" follow the below steps:

Boot the computer with a Windows 95 or Windows 98 Startup diskette or another bootable diskette with sys.com on it.
At the A:\> prompt type:

sys c: <press enter>


After pressing enter you should receive the prompt "System Transferred". Once the file system has been transferred reboot the computer without the diskette and attempt to reproduce the error.

try this dude! gud luck!

 

[Rick]

Issue:

NTLDR is Missing.

Additional Information:

From the Computer Hope Dictionary:

Short for NT loader, NTLDR is a program loaded from the hard drive boot sector that displays the Microsoft Windows NT startup menu and helps Microsoft Windows NT load.

Cause:

Systems hard disk drive has FAT32 file system.
Computer hard disk drive has INT-13 extensions with a system-ID type of 0C in the partition table
The heads value in the FAT32 BIOS Pattern Block (BPB) is inaccurate.
Solutions:

To resolve the error message "NTLDR is Missing" follow the below steps:

Boot the computer with a Windows 95 or Windows 98 Startup diskette or another bootable diskette with sys.com on it.
At the A:\> prompt type:

sys c: <press enter>


After pressing enter you should receive the prompt "System Transferred". Once the file system has been transferred reboot the computer without the diskette and attempt to reproduce the error.

try this dude! gud luck!

[size=4]DO NOT TRY THE ABOVE[/size].

It will result in tradgedy. This is only useful if you are using Windows 9x and NOT 2000 or XP. And it may actually make repairing your problem much more complicated.

The fact it says you are missing NTLDR, that means you DO have a boot sector still. It's just looking in the wrong place.

You should be able to edit the boot.ini in C: to point to the proper partition. If not or if you'd rather not fool with something so complicated, then you can use system repair and fix this problem, I'm sure.

http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/rep... XP by Installing Over top of Existing Setup:

 

[Bungee]

I had the "NTLDR is missing" problem on a PC I was working on the other night and used a combination of other peoples ideas to solve it. It was a FAT32 partition, not NTFS. You need a Win98 bootdisk (available from www.bootdisk.com) and your XP CD. Boot to the floppy and then type "sys c:" (without the quotes) then enter. Reboot the PC to the XP CD and take the repair option. Once at the prompt, type "fixboot c:" (again, without the quotes) and enter. Remove all disks/cds and reboot. Hopefully the PC will boot as normal. As I say, it worked for me so I hope it helps others with the same problem.

 

[tipstir]

Too much of headache just re-image (re-install XP) the PC

 

[Rick]

Doesn't this post belong in a museum, not on the first page of "Storage and Networking"?

 

[ChaosUltima]

External OS

Hi all, mind giving me a hand here?
I'm trying to boot my computer from an OS on an external harddisk drive instead of a CD but I recieve an error "NTLDR is missing". Anyone know how to solve it? The OS is able to boot from the CD but not the ext HD.
To be more specific, the OS im trying to boot from is Ubuntu, if that helps
Thanks =D