NTLDR Missing

[decrepid]

I am having the same problem although with a twist that I have not seen people talk about yet. I have installed XP Pro on my machine and I always get the message in boot-up that the NTLDR is missing. I have tried y'alls suggestions and have yet to find one that works. I would like to blame this one on my mobo since it has caused me other inconveniences, but I don't have the $$$ to replace it yet so I have to fix it or deal with the quirk of having it only boot up as long as I have the XP Pro CD in one of the CD-Rom drives. As long as that sucker's in their the machine will boot up and run like there were no problems.

AMD Athlon XP 1700+
Soyo K7V Dragon Plus
256mb of Kinston DDR PC2100
6.7G + 20.5G HD
Pioneer DVD-115
Samsung 248B CD-RW
Iomega Zip 100
Floppy

That's my set up. The bios is current and I have no idea as to what is making my machine f&*$ up. Thanx.

[Darthgary]

You may have to manually copy the NT load directory yourself!

[decrepid]

How would I do that?

[ussenterprise]

Copy NTLDR, boot.ini, and ntdetect.com to a disk....

[SiliconJon]

I take it you have reformatted those drives and done a fresh install?

I had a similar problem when I merged a hard drive from a dead XP Pro system. The WD was in the old system with XP Pro, and the Maxtor was a fresh install of XP Pro after the other system failed. After installing XP on the maxtor and getting my system up and running, I installed the WD into the system as the Primary Slave, with XP still installed on the active partition of that drive.

THIS caused major havoc with my system. McAfee suddenly expired! Then a boot or two later, XP would not let me use it until I called to get an overide number, even though I should have had 28 days left to activate it. Seems XP pulled a ton of crap from the old XP. Well, I rebooted and reinstalled XP onto the Maxtor as I wanted to get some info from the partition the other XP was installed on. This gave me an error much like the one you were having: NTLDR Bad or Missing. Seems installing XP on a PM active partition while it exists on a PS active partition will not work. So rather than go to more trouble to try and recover the data, I just wiped the old XP partition with a fresh full format, wiped the new XP partition the same, and reinstalled XP.

All is well, exept for the hardware problem I am having (currently narrowed down to PSU, motherboard, hard drive (maxtor), or CPU)

[decrepid]

I have reformatted a couple of times. I rearranged the drives and the cables inside my comp, but I am leary of reformatting. I don't want to reload my system just to have the same problem there. I found that as long as there is a disk in one of the drives, i.e. CD-ROM or Floppy that have ntldr on it, the computer will boot up. The system just won't read the file off of the hard drive. I have tried all of the tricks including copying the ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini on a disk and replacing the files through XP Pro's System Recovery Console. If there are any other tricks other than are posted on this site I am open to them. Thanx.

[SiliconJon]

Well, what I would do would be to unplug the zip, the floppy, the second CDROM, and the second hard drive. Leaving only the hard drive which is the target fot the OS and the optical drive to hold the XP CD.

Be sure the hard drive is on the primary channel, set to SINGLE (be sure you have those jumpers correct, look it up on the net to be sure. Quantum drives are quite different in this manor vs Maxtor or WD). Attach that drive to the last device [end of ribbon] on your IDE cable which is attached to your primary IDE channel (IDE0 of 1 or IDE1 of 2). Set the jumpers on the CDROM to MASTER and attach it to the last device on the IDE attached to the SECONDARY IDE channel. Set your BIOS to boot: ATAPI (OR CDROM), HDD0 respectively.

Boot to the CDROM. Through XP's setup, remove all partitions on the hard drive. If you're going to use only one partition on that hard drive, create a new partition and do a full format with NTFS (unless you need FAT32 for a dual boot). You will then install the OS.

If this is the routine you followed and still have the error, I could only say there is a hardware malfuntion, either in the optical or magneto storage device, or possibly the motherboard.

If this routine resolves the issue, you can then add the second CDROM by setting it to slave. Adding the second hard drive will depend on the brands you have as to what the jumper settings will be on either drive (Single, Master, Slave, CS).

[squeech]

SiliconJon has some good suggestions.

If you're afraid to reformat just yet, you can always do a repair install from the XP CD. Just another addition to the list.

BTW, Welcome to TechIMO.

[decrepid]

Hey thanx SiliconJon. I found where I messed up. In my Bios my boot order was set to floppy, cd-rom, hdd1. After reading the posting I realized where I messed up. Got it fixed and working fine. Thanx again.

[SiliconJon]

Darn that HDD1 !!