NTLDR is missing

Levy · January 3rd, 2006, 11:55 PM

Hi, Can someone help me? after my last motherboard died i got a new MOBO from the 3 year warranty. it is the same motherboard type, same as the last one.

I put everything together and now when i start up it says NTLDR is missing. What can I do to fix this? Any help will be grate!

Thanks

Mickwish · January 4th, 2006, 12:02 AM

It means it can't find the NT boot loader to load windows. Either you have set up your drives differently or that "same" motherboard uses different drivers. Check your drive setup first, and then reinstall windows on top of itself to fix the boot loader location. You may be lucky if you have XP Pro and do a repair and a fixboot, but it's likely it will need a resintall.

Cheers
Mick

Levy · January 4th, 2006, 01:09 AM

ok thanks i'll try that i guess

eagle1 · January 4th, 2006, 01:19 AM

From another thread:

Pop the Win2K or XP cd in,
Hit repair,Select the OS
type - copy e:/ntldr c:
type - copy e:/ntdetect.com c:

assumming the cd is in e: and c: is your main drive

Also, do a search in the forums as there seems to be a lot of threads about this and probably different approaches you can try.
Go over them and select the approach you are most comfortable with of see if one of those work in your particular case!

jokostel · January 4th, 2006, 01:28 AM

i have had it work by placing the drive in a second pc with the same os, coping the file, and working okay, but the most feasible solution is to try and repair, otherwise, i wuld start from scratch...makes for a cleaner build anyways...

Levy · January 5th, 2006, 01:15 PM

Hey, I got the problem fixed. What was wrong was that it was not reading the main drive c it was only picking up the slave drive and CD ram. Had to go in settings and fix it to make it read and start up with the main drive. I have no idea how I got it to read it lol.

Thanks for the help

Levy · January 5th, 2006, 01:20 PM

oh and i didnt even need the windows XP CD

famosbrown · January 5th, 2006, 01:23 PM

Yeah...sounds like you just changed the boot order and before the slave was higher in the priority and did not contain the OS, or didn't have an active partition.

Famos

cpembo · January 5th, 2006, 01:29 PM

The exact same thing happened to me 3 days ago. i ended up swapping my drives about and reinstalling windows . tried the repair c:\ ntldetect etc but it didnt work. strange this dhould happen at similar times wonder if theres a virus or spyware out there thats causing this because i didnt change any settings in the weeks before this happened.

Fagin · January 5th, 2006, 05:56 PM

I will add this in case it helps some one in the future.

I had the NTLDR error message on a computer i was trying to fix for some one, it been through two three other people before me, i was the last resort, so i did not know what hasd caused the problem.

I fit the hard drive from the faulty puter in my own known good one, and i got the NTLDR message again, which i think i am right in saying that ruled out every other possibility, meaning it had to be a faulty hard drive when i tried it back in the old puter and got a differant message saying ERROR READING DISK.

Some one in another thread said that NTLDR could mean the hard drive was on the way out, it looks to me as though he was right, so bearing what he said in mind i tried a new hard drive, and installed windows no problem.

So it looks as though in my case, it was the hard drive that was kn-ckered.

One to bear in mind perhaps.