NTLDR is Missing

[Guest]

Hey all, I have a quandry, I spent a good portion of last night trying to fix
it, to no avail. I just installed Vista as the primary OS on this PC,
formatting XP. and upon boot, if I do not have the installation DVD in the
drive, i get the above error, "NTLDR is Missing" Now I know that Vista uses a
new boot manager, making NTLDR a piece of the past, but surely theres some
work around on it? The DVD is a minor inconveniance, but its an inconveiance
Id rather not have.
I ran into a thread here that had a way of restoring NTLDR, but it sounded
like that was removing vista alltogether, this Id like to avoid, in the past
few hours ive become quite a fan of it.

Thanks for any help
-IL

 

[Mikee]

Hi
I have the same problem.
Will follow thread to see if there is a fix.
Mikee

 

[Guest]

You may have a COMPRESSED or CORRUPT NTLDR. If you checked the box on the
drive dialog "compress drive to save disk space" you may need to decompress
NTLDR. You can only do this from the XP CD Recovery command line. Change dir
to the root of your boot volume, then:

attrib -C NTLDR

If no NTLDR is found, then you will need to copy it from your installation
CD. You may need to modify the attributes (SHR) and then decrompress the
copied NTLDR.

 

[Guest]

The drive is not formatted, so ill assume its corrupt. in that event
resetting the ntldr should fix it then? even though XP is no longer
installed? when resetting it, where should I extract it to, directly to the
boot record? or anywhere to my drive?

 

[Guest]

Sorry for the double post, I solved it, but I think it brings up another
problem I need resolved. the bootloader is actually now on my primary PATA
IDE0 as the boot disk. I resolved this by setting that drive as the primary
in the boot order, yet the OS system files are on the SATA drive. is there
anyway to move those boot files over to my sata? using the BCDMGR or
something, or what settings would I put in those? Im new to vista, but ill
tend to pick up rather quickly. I can live with the current configuration,
but Id rather not depend on it.

any help fixing my new problem would be again, appreciated.

Mikee, if you have a PATA hdd, try setting it as the primary boot disk, if
that resolves the same issue, then Id feel issue this needs some attention

 

[Guest]

How did you resolve the error?

I also have a SATA with Vista installed, but my PATA has the "boot"
directory that Vista put on there. First, I would like to resolve the "NTLDR
is missing" error so that I can boot into Vista w/o the DVD, and then, I
would like to move the "boot" files over to the SATA so that there are no
boot/system files whatsoever on the PATA. Right now my BIOS is set to boot
from SATA, then PATA.