NTLDR not found

[Chipski]

Help!! Last night my machine crashed (blue screen, phys memory dump). And now when I try to restart I get the message "NTLDR not found. Press CTL-ALT-DEL to restart."

My operating system is XP Pro (it's legal). I have reviewed some of your older threads on this issue, but have not been able to get my machine going.

Any help would be much appreciated!


Rich (newbie to this board)

[HeadBand]

boot from the windows xp cd and enter the recovery consle then type fixmbr

[Chipski]

Tried that....no luck....

[Bill in SD, CA]

Welcome to TechIMO!!

Did you try to repair in the Console?

Bill

[Chipski]

Yes...But I'm not really sure how to use it. When I get in I only have one option for Operating System (1. WINNT). Is this correct? I am using XP.

I select 1, and then have tried a multitude of commands from fixmbr to trying to copy the file from the CD, as microsoft's help instructs.

[Chipski]

I have tried both the fixmbr and fixboot - no go.

I have tried the "copy D:\i386\ntldr" from the repair console, with the XP disc in the D drive. This was recommended on the microsoft.com rescources site. All I get is access denied!!

I have tried to re-install XP, but it doesn't like the XP Pro disk when it does it's validation.

I really need to get this machine working again. Any other ideas?

[secureweb]

If you have another computer, verify that the path to ntldr is x:\i386\ntldr, it sometimes varies depending on where your CD is from.
If it is, do you have more than 1 drive/partition? you may need to enter the CDROM's drive letter instead of D:
In repair console, verify that NTLDR is actually missing; if it's still there, it may be corrupted, which is usually due to hardware problems or virus activity.

just remove everything if nothing else works. get a boot floppy.
FDISK. remove all partitions. put your CD in, remove the floppy, and reboot.

Get a copy of Win2k. No validation, same engine, no bullshit.

[Chipski]

Thanks. CDROM drive letter is D. I have 2 HDs. The original, which it boots from is not partitioned. My second drive, a 200GB Maxtor, is partitioned into 2 drives, but should not be creating this prob.

Would a bad path account for the "access denied" message?

[Chipski]

How do I verify it's missing from the repair console?

[melissaandrews]

My friend thought she had a worm or virus. The home page for Windows XP said to run a virus scan so we did. Now it is saying that NTLDR is missing. It says to press any key to reboot but when she presses a key, nothing happens. I do know a little bit about programming, but not enough. I does say that there are no viruses, though. Can someone please help me. I do not want to try anything until I know for certain that it will fix the problem.