NTLDR is missing

[me]

My son has phoned me. In spite of loads of precautions he is in
trouble again.

Three months ago his Mesh desktop gave him the thumbs down when his
Maxtor 160Gb failed. he bought another and another copy of XP Home
because he couldn't put his hand on the first one (money to burn).

HD1 has been formatted and set upo with an installation of XP in
reserve. His usual copy is on the new Maxtor, HD0. I understand that
all of his data is held in separate partition and that he has a backup
of his O/S using Acronis True Image v8, and a bootable rescue CD.

Hid HD0 failed and he tried to format it to restore his backup. No go.
Now he can't get his XP on HD1 to boot. His rescue CD won't boot.
His True Image install disk which can be a rescue disk won't boot and
all he gets on POST is "NTLDR is missing".

Can anyone offer a suggestion, apart from standing on his head and
drinking a bottle of milk backwards?

Colin

 

[John Barnett MVP]

Visit my website http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org Click the Win XP Faq
button and take a look at question 37

if you also take a look at question 10 'creating an emergency boot disk'
this may help you boot to the desktop of one of your drives. If you can't
create an emergency boot disk (because you don't have a pc with xp on)
contact me via my website details in the Contact me section and i can email
you the relevant files. All you need is a floppy disk.

 

[me]

Visit my website http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org Click the Win XP Faq
button and take a look at question 37

if you also take a look at question 10 'creating an emergency boot disk'
this may help you boot to the desktop of one of your drives. If you can't
create an emergency boot disk (because you don't have a pc with xp on)
contact me via my website details in the Contact me section and i can email
you the relevant files. All you need is a floppy disk.

Thank. It 's a shame that he has this problem when he's taken so many
precautions. HD1 is safely out of the machine now where it can come to
no harm. All backups are on it.

The problem is that he can't boot up to a floppy. I've sent him
details of downloading the right bootup floppy from MS, but so far
nothing that he already had would boot up. Ghost bootup 2001 (Iknow
it doesn't work with XP) just hung, as did maxblast3, and all other
floppies that were supposed to boot up.

If only he could wipe everything on HD0 he'd be alright.

Many thanks

Colin

 

[John Barnett MVP]

Just a thought. has he got a windows 98 or ME startup disk? If not download
one from www.bootdisk.com It doesn't matter if he has a FAT32 or NTFS file
system for this excercise (Win 98 ME startup disks will not work with NTFS -
but we are not out to use the disk for anything spectacular)
Insert the floppy into the floppy drive and reboot the machine. Now if the
file system is FAT32 the floppy will boot to the 'A' prompt. In this
instance, at the 'A' prompt type: fdisk and then press Enter. This will
allow you to remove the partition from disk0 and then recreate a new one (or
more than one if you need to)
If the file system is NTFS you will simply get the option to use fdisk.

 

[Sharon F]

His True Image install disk which can be a rescue disk won't boot and
all he gets on POST is "NTLDR is missing".

He shouldn't see this Windows boot message error using that boot disk. It
sounds like he missed pressing the key to boot from CD and Windows went
ahead and tried to load.

 

[me]

Many thanks.

I have arranged for him to be able to download a boot disk.

The position now is that I advised late last night that he should run
XP setup and at the right time delete all partitions and install to an
ntfs partition at the front of the drive. Since he keeps his O/S
separate to his data and most applications he should make the
partition about 10 or 12 Gb.

All seemed to be well but he installed Norton Security and it went
online and downloaded updates but not all of them. He was advised to
restart and download the rest of the updates later. On boot up
"nothing worked". He phoned me as he was on his way to the pub to
drown his sorrows.

I am going to drive down to London on Sunday having first studied all
the advice I have received.

I am in two minds how to approach it. I could take a W98 boot up disk
with me, or buy a cheap second hand HD with no history with his
machine, or take a w98 laptop.

Fdisk and I are old friends but would it really do a better job than
XP setup? Would the boot up disk even run since all other boot disks
have failed (apart from XP setup)?

He keeps insisting that his BIOS is corrupt but I don't think that can
be so.

It seems really strange that so many drives are failing. It can't
even be a loose connection since all three ports would have to have a
poor connection.

Thanks again.

Colin

 

[me]

He shouldn't see this Windows boot message error using that boot disk. It
sounds like he missed pressing the key to boot from CD and Windows went
ahead and tried to load.

When I'm there on Sunday I shall watch for this.
We now know what this message means. XP doesn't like the geometry and
thinks it's being run in a different machine. This is understandable
because somehow when in the early stages of this emergency he
re-installed and his C: drive became G: drive. From then it was not
"mountable". We still don't know why no drives at all are booting.

Many thanks.

Colin

 

[me]

He shouldn't see this Windows boot message error using that boot disk. It
sounds like he missed pressing the key to boot from CD and Windows went
ahead and tried to load.

I'm driving down to London tomorrow (Sunday) and taking everything
with me.

Sadly, he is a doctor and is involved in treating those poor devils
that were caught in the terrorist blasts, so his computer is not his
top priority just now.

Many thanks

Colin

 

[Sharon F]

I'm driving down to London tomorrow (Sunday) and taking everything
with me.

Sadly, he is a doctor and is involved in treating those poor devils
that were caught in the terrorist blasts, so his computer is not his
top priority just now.

Many thanks

You're welcome, Colin. Can't put the rest into words yet...