One-time “NTLDR is missing” error

[GreyGoblin]

Hello! I have a rather old PC, but it has been serving me very well until now, with just a few upgrades. Since a few days, however, I have a stupid problem that I cannot figure out.

It all started when one day the PC got frozen after booting Windows Vista. It did not respond at all; only the hard disk light was constantly on. I could not even use the reset button and had to press the power-on button for 5 seconds to make the PC shut down. Upon the reboot, the PC displayed a BIOS error and offered to press F1 or F2 to load the defaults, which I (probably stupidly) did.

Now the PC is working fine again with one exception. When I turn it on, the first time it always displays the “NTLDR is missing” error. When I press Ctrl-Alt-Del, it boots normally. I saw that error on the PCs of my friends before, and it was always caused by broken hard disks. However, in their cases Ctrl-Alt-Del never helped, so I hope my problem is a simpler one.

My HD is 1Tb Hitachi HDS721010KLA. The BIOS is AMI 080012 2/13/2006 v. 2.3. The BIOS settings Type, LBA/Large mode, DMA mode, and Hard Disk SMART are all set to Auto. I have no idea what these settings were before the crash.

Any ideas would be appreciated!

[osprey4]

Hi GreyGoblin,

If you boot to the BIOS, you may have the wrong drive or device set as the first boot device. Then obviously, the BIOS wouldn't be able to find the boot loader.

[GreyGoblin]

Thank you, osprey4! No, the order of devices in BIOS is correct. The hard disk comes first. Anyway, it the order were wrong, Ctrl-Alt-Del would not have worked, I think.

[Taxmancometh]

Try this guide. Recovering the Vista Bootloader from the DVD - EasyBCD - NeoSmart Technologies Wiki

The ntldr missing is a common problem that can be fixed.

[GreyGoblin]

Taxmancometh: Thanks! I have tried to reset BCD configuration using EasyBCD, but it did not have any effect. Perhaps I should try using the Vista CD instead. I’ve got another idea, however. When I start my PC, for a couple of seconds I see a message about some “Realtek RTL8110S/8169S Gigabit Root Agent”. If I press Shift-F10, I see a menu, where the Boot protocol is specified as PXE and the Boot order is Int 18h. Whatever that is. Can this cause the problem? In the BIOS, the boot order is correct: HD first, then DVD, then floppy. There is also an option “Boot from other devices”, which is currently set to Yes.

[Taxmancometh]

Realtek most likely refers to your network card. PXE boot should be off. and I would try disabling the option "boot from other devices." It very well could be that your computer is not booting from the proper device, i.e your hard drive which means Vista is fine.

[GreyGoblin]

"Boot from other devices" made no difference. However, after a lot of fiddling, I think I managed to solve the problem by disabling "Quick Boot" in the BIOS. At least the computer started normally once; if the error comes back, I will post again :-). Thanks for all the suggestions!

[Taxmancometh]

Good to hear. I figured after a few other posts of yours that it had to be the way the computer was booting and not Vista its self.