Windows XP won't boot, and neither will 98 SE

[Guest]

I'm running a dual boot system, and recently my computer crashed, but it's
strange, I can load it with a system disk and gain access to one of my drives
(I have two separate volumes) but without that system disc, I can't boot my
system at all....The computer can't seem to find a ntldr.exe and I know it
happens to be very important on mismatched systems.... will running Windows
XP Setup on Repair mode cure the problem?

 

[Malke]

I'm running a dual boot system, and recently my computer crashed, but
it's strange, I can load it with a system disk and gain access to one
of my drives (I have two separate volumes) but without that system
disc, I can't boot my system at all....The computer can't seem to find
a ntldr.exe and I know it happens to be very important on mismatched
systems.... will running Windows XP Setup on Repair mode cure the
problem?

Try this:

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\ntdetec 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

Malke
(thanks to Alex Nichol for the fix)