Missing NTDLR file

[Brad]

I recently built my daughter a new PC. I thought
we could move the old HDD over to this PC for a master
drive. Upon installing the drive XP informed us that this
was not the PC it was licensed to and refused to run. We
purchased a new copy of windows XP and now it won't
insall to the new HDD, we get a message that
says "missing NTDLR file" with only the new HDD insalled
on this PC.
When the drive PC was setup a copy of XP was put
on to test the PC before I shipped it too her home. It
was then formatted and shipped to her.
Does anyone know a way to resolve this issue?

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

Boot with a Win98 boot disk and run FDISK Make sure that the partition that
XP partition is set as Active. If you don't have a Win98 boot disk, the
files to create one can be downloaded from www.bootdisk.com

 

[davetest]

I recently built my daughter a new PC. I thought
we could move the old HDD over to this PC for a master
drive. Upon installing the drive XP informed us that this
was not the PC it was licensed to and refused to run. We
purchased a new copy of windows XP and now it won't
insall to the new HDD, we get a message that
says "missing NTDLR file" with only the new HDD insalled
on this PC.
When the drive PC was setup a copy of XP was put
on to test the PC before I shipped it too her home. It
was then formatted and shipped to her.
Does anyone know a way to resolve this issue?

Here's some general info,
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];q314057
but beyond that, this message can occur if the boot.ini file
is pointing to the wrong partition.
Possibly booting to the recovery console and choosing the fixboot
command would fix it.
Dave