My house pc burned up long time back, well I decided since I couldn't upgrade to the qaud core q6600 chip any time soon, I'd jes put it back togeather wit another board. So I did, an it was operational as far as it was. But then I was claenin some stuff out an found a p4 board, so robbin my brother of some parts I stuck it togeather, ran well... cept... out of 6 different lan cards I couldn't git one of em to work. Spent a day an night workin on it, tried everthin I know to try an couldn't git it to work. Couple freash installs, couple different drives etc etc, so I finally threw my hands up an decided to go back to my older board.

All this was because I was playin AA (americas army) an was havin really bad performance of my video so decided to try an make that one work. Anyways. Go back to my old board an anyone wit XP install history knows that you cain't jes take an xp os an stick it on radically different hardware witout repairin the install. I musta talked to the microsucks puter 10 times the last few days.

Well, I'm now on my old hardware, the dual p3 chips 1.0 gig. An I've got the stupidest lil error. Any time I try to boot the puter now, I git the dreaded NTLDR is missin hit control alt delte to restart etc etc. Well, I went through an rebuilt the boot.ini, I used the fixboot command under recovery. I didn't use the fixmbr (gives me nasty flash backs) and still, nuthin. Updated the bios jes on the off chance, even stuck another ide cable in it to be sure. Still same problem.

There is one way an one way only I've been able to boot this puter. Now someone explain this one to me... If I leave my xp install disk in the cd drive when I boot the puter, it'll of course ask if I wanna boot from it an I jes leave it to time out, then the puter will boot an work fine. Take the disk out an boot the puter, NTLDR is missin.... Anyone care to take a gander at this one?

ntldr is a required file to boot windows.....the one on your hd is probably corrupt. Have you tried to boot to your xp disk and run the XP repair?

If that doesn't work try booting to a floppy, running "fdisk /mbr" then repairing?


I would explore those two avenues...


Also have you run "chkdsk /f" to check for a bad disk?

Yeah I've actually tried repair option as well. fdisk won't work on an ntfs partition if I remember correctly, so instead you can use fixmbr, but then you risk losin the partition tables an that's that for the drive.

Typically, least in my expereince when 2k er xp say the ntldr is missin then sumthin has gone wrong wit the boot.ini file. Normally jes an easy deal to edit the file, point the thin to start where windows is installed.

It's not a big deal to me, cause won't be long I'll be havin to work on it agin, soon as I do git another board etc. But this is the first time I've actually had this particular problem. Normally if ntldr is missin, that's that, stickin a cd in the thin isn't goin to make the partition actually boot. But that's what it's doin right now, wit jes the disk sittin in the drive it'll boot, witout it won't. Go figure. Unless it's a timin deal.. I donno I'm startin to reach here, but less it's a matter of between POST an boot sumthin is runnin by to fast/slow an causin the problem, I jes donno. Might toy wit that one later.