Boot problem with Win XP Pro

[Jonathan Hill]

Somebody Help!! I have a friend whose PC (AMD Athalon,
128 MB RAM Win XP Pro)will freeze right after the desktop
appears, or when the XP boot screen comes up the blue
load bar stops, then the HDD makes this high-pitched
noise and then "idles" down. It never fails to do so, it
just happens at different times. I brought it home and
put it into two PC's I have (350 & 450 PII's) and it
never makes it past the first grey bar that comes up
before the XP boot screen. So I put it in my 933 PIII
machine and got the "ntldr is missing" error
message. ??? So I go to the support site and got some
info on making a boot disk, which is where I ran into my
problem. I cannot find my ntldr file on my XP Pro
machine; I have unhidden all files and told the search
program to look at sys and hidden files and folders, and
to ignore case, and it still tells me that the file
doesn't exsist, which shouldn't be possible or my PC
wouldn't start, right? ANY help or suggestions would be
greatly appreciated....oh I don't have my XP disk (don't
loan stuff to relatives) and he doesn't have his either.

 

[Joseph Conway [MSFT]]

Its located on c:\, you have to turn off system protected files as well.