Strange NTLDR IS MISSING Problem!

[hermanaki]

Hi all!

I suppose you already know when the NTLDR problem appears when you boot but what is happening seems a bit strange.

When I set the hard drive as the 1st boot device and the cd as th 2nd, I get this error.
When I set the cd as 1st boot device and the hard drive as 2nd and I have no cd in the drive I get this error.
When I set the cd as 1st boot device and the hard drive as 2nd and I have a cd in the drive, be it windows xp or asus drivers cd, I get the option to press any key to boot from cd and if I don't press any key, the computer boots alright!!!

The details:

My hard drive that has the windows os is the e: which is also the boot drive. I can see that from the BIOS as well as from edit boot.ini which shows me an rdisk2, and 2 in diskmgmt is the e: drive. The c: in diskmgmt appears to be the system drive.

I tried to copy ntldr and ntldetect from windows xp cd to e: from the recovery console but access is denied.

Any help would be greatly appreciated guys....

 

[sw123]

Two possible problems:

1.: Bad harddrive

2.:Virus or other infection.

Try booting from Windows CD and run a virus scan, or try a Windows repair.

 

[hermanaki]

Infection : Possibly but I have spybot,zone alarm and nod32, all up to date and all show that the computer is clean. How do I go about booting from cd and then scan for viruses? Does windows repair erase my files? If not, how about my registry alterations from good progs like zone alarm?

Harddrive problem : It was working fine untill I formated my computer.

Actually what I think, happened is that somehow, drive letters and addresses were messed up. When I was about to format my computer, I got that e: was the hard drive that had my previous os, when actually it as c: who had the previous os. But because I couldn't do much else in the setup screen I chose to format the drive that showed me that had the os, which appeared to be e:. Is there any way to set things straight, somehow tell the computer that e: should be c:? I tried to change it from diskmgmt but it won't let me change boot or system drive letter.

 

[sw123]

Ok, windows repair should NOT erase your files. Check HEREl on how to reinstall windows.