NTLDR is missing? What does this mean?

[Guest]

I tried removing my old HD and just connecting the
new drive that I installed and this message came up
when I rebooted.

NTLD is missing, pre Control-Alt-Delete to restart your computer.

Anyone know what this means and know how I can fix this?

In the past I have never had a problem installing a new HD, this
time it's a nightmare. Why?

Thanks for your help
Tony

 

[MAP]

I tried removing my old HD and just connecting the
new drive that I installed and this message came up
when I rebooted.

NTLD is missing, pre Control-Alt-Delete to restart your computer.

Anyone know what this means and know how I can fix this?

In the past I have never had a problem installing a new HD, this
time it's a nightmare. Why?

Thanks for your help
Tony

Hope this helps!



From a newsgroup post by late Mr.Alex Nichol, Microsoft MVP:

The MBR code hands the boot on to the Active partition; the boot code in

that loads NTLDR. There are two cases:

"NTLDR not found" at all may arise because the incorrect partition has been
set as active. This can happen if you have a dual boot and have messed with
the files in that partition that boot; this is not the XP one, or have
shifted the boot to the XP partition which does not have NTLDR in it.

"NTLDR damaged" means what it says, the file is there but not working.

Either way, if you have a proper retail type XP CD, not some maker's
recovery disk:

Set the BIOS to boot CD before Hard Disk. Boot the XP CD and, instead of
Setup, take the immediate R for Repair. Assume any password requested is
blank, and TAB over. Assuming this sees the CD as D (likely) give:

COPY D:\i386\ntldr C:\
COPY D:\i386\ntdetect C:\
(a file that may also be missing)
then rebuild the boot configuration boot.ini file by
Attrib -H -R -S C:\boot.ini
(if not found skip the next line)
DEL C:\boot.ini
BootCfg /Rebuild

 

[JMI]

Check your BIOS and make sure the boot drive (where XP is installed) is set
as the 1st drive. I know Dell systems let you setup the order of the drives
and when mine gets out of wack and it puts one of the other drives as the
boot drive, I get the exact same message.

Hope that helps,

Jeff