NTLDR missing

paparlz · November 29th, 2002, 04:14 PM

I also have theNTLDR missing problem. Sadly for me, its on my office machine running Win2000. The HD disk there is partioned into C: and D: drives. However, drive C: has become completely full, whilst D: has about 14Gb free. Rather than waiting for the technicians at work (who seem to be overworked and take days to do anything) I decide to use my own copy of Partition Magic (which I've use succesfuly at home) to resize the partitions. As a first step I decided to convert the C: drive to a FAT32 partition. PM stopped after a couple of seconds and informed me that there wasn't enough space to continue. On rebooting, disaster struck in the form of the NTLDR missing message. I came home this evening feeling pretty sick, thinking that I'd totally corrupted my office computer and lost huge amounts of data. Having searched the web, I now don't feel so bad.

My dilemma is: do I follow the advice of Steelpreacher above (which comes from the Microsoft knowledge base) and use my own old Win95 startup disk with its copy of sys.com to try to correct the problem or do I report the problem to the technicians at work. If the first option works then noone will know about my tinkering with office equipment. But if it doesn't work, will I make the problem worse?

Steelpreacher · November 29th, 2002, 04:29 PM

I have used that fix on two seperate systems that were upgraded to 2k and XP. Both were FAT32. I have never seen this on NTFS. I tried other things before I found that article on Microsoft, but to no avail. Good luck paparlz.

OuTpaTienT · November 29th, 2002, 08:15 PM

Weirdness. What strikes me as strange is that my system seems to fit the perfect profile for developing this problem...yet I've never encountered it.

Win98 --> upgraded to --> Win2000
Main boot drive (C:\) is FAT32. Other drives have been converted to NTFS.

...

paparlz, I would not be hesitant to act on that tip from Steelpreacher (from the MSKBase). It's not going to destroy any data on the drive or anything like that. If it works then great, if it doesn't work then everything that's on your hard drive will still be there once you get the problem sorted out.

...

I must say I find veighx's message the most intriguing.

I almost wish I had this problem so I could fix it then tell everyone else how to fix it. But I guess I'll just keep watching here for a more definitive solution. But it sounds to me like Steelpreacher's advice is the ticket. If anyone has done that procedure and it hasn't worked then please speak up, we need to know that too. (But I'm betting it works for most.)

...

One last menial comment; I have never, EVER seen so many newbies in a single thread. This has got to be some kind of record. "Record keeper. Look that up." ...

noseslayer · January 4th, 2003, 07:49 PM

ok, I have the exact same problem, NTLDR not missing after a hard drive change. As for the people updating from win9x to win2000, go read microsofts page. I personally have tried all the format /mbr fixboot fixmbr reinstalling eveything. This is after a motherboard change, everything else the same.

Now, here is what I believe the problem is. There is some large disk access option in the old bios I had, I wish I could go get the exact name, but I can't. Anyways, there was a dos option and an other option. If it was on the other option it booted fine, other was not the defualt option, dos was. I had to enable other to get the drive to be recognized a long time ago, but anyways the MBR was originally written using that other option.

On the new motherboard (BIOS) that option is not present. When I boot off the win2k CD it comments that the MBR is either missing or corrupted, but it doesn't seem to be able to rewrite it. The drive is there fine, I have access to all the files. Yet the MBR still seems to be messed up, I have a valid ntldr and other junk in C:\. This leads me to believe this bios option installed the MBR in an odd location, and now the new bios cannot read from it. Thus it just messes up everytime. The recovery options detect it though, and treat it as if it is alright and that is why the autorecover doesn't work. I really don't know how to fix it, I am sure I will figure it out sometime tonight, but I just thought I would post since this problem sounds so similar to mine. kudos to all.

gooutontop · January 15th, 2003, 11:14 AM

Here's another first time post. I signed up just to respond to this thread. I had this problem last night and after a search and some tips from this forum was able to get mine back up.

Mine just went dead in the middle of reading a forum page. Screen went black and it finally tried to reboot but no go. Got the message, "NTLDR missing...". First thing I thought was the hard drive crashed so the first thing I did was to pull a hard drive out of another computer with XP Pro (by the way that's what was running on the problem machine)and slap it in to see if it would boot up and to my surprise, I got "NTLDR missing...". This is the strange part because now I'm thinking my BIOS got wacked or something so I reseated all of the cables and cleared CMOS, did a load defaults in the BIOS and then paged through to set everything back up to the hardware attached and it still wouldn't work.

I did a repair of XP - nope
I tried Fixboot - nope
I tried the trick of loading the sys off of a 98 bootable disk - This allowed it to boot to c: prompt.
Then I tried fixmbr and it came up.

Then I put the original drive back in and tried fixmbr - nope
So to summarize, I know that in my case doing all three worked but not sure if you could drop one of the steps or not. With the second drive I just put the 98 disk back in, did sys c:, then booted the XP disk into recovery and did fixboot and then fixmbr and the second drive came up fine.

Any guesses as to how a problem with the first drive ended up being a problem with the second drive???

Out

Judas · January 15th, 2003, 11:45 AM

Message Deleted.

downloader · January 19th, 2003, 04:49 PM

Well,,,lots of people having this problem,,do you think it could be by using hooky copies of xp,,i am........at the moment.

I have to 80 gig hard drives,,one with 98 se on it,,the other with xp pro on it,,i was sucessfully using acronis os selector,,,my xp partition was getting full so i decided to merge a spare fat 32 partition from the same drive onto it,,,i opted to convert the partition to ntfs first,,,then the crappy pm crashed halfway thru causing me to switch off at the mains,,,,i ended up deleting partition and reinstalling because i was getting stop error 0x0000007B with xp,,,,when i had reinstalled i now get the ntldr missing,,dont make a lot of sense to me....

Bill in SD, CA · January 20th, 2003, 01:06 PM

Weird, I rebooted this morning and got the same message: NTDLR missing. I was about to start a recover when I noticed I had a blank floppy I formatted the night before still in the drive. Whoops!

Bill

yeadon563 · January 20th, 2003, 01:55 PM

I can never get Recovery Console to work. It always asks for a password. When I put in my Windows Login pass, it says it is wrong.

Can't u go to dos, and copy ntdetect from a floppy? I have a Xp boot disk that lets me get to safe mode. U should be able to copy A:\ntdetect.exe C:\.

I guess everyone should be prepared with backup copies of ntdetect on floppies or on cd.

Yeadon563

gooutontop · January 20th, 2003, 02:08 PM

yeadon,

It's not your Windows Logon password that it wants. It's the password that you told it to use as the administrative password when you originally loaded the software. Of course I guess you could have made them the same though.

Good Luck,
Out