What is NTLDR? And where the hell has mine gone?

[subucni]

hey,

hope you can help me here

My pc was fine last night, i turned it off and went to bed, woke up this morning and decided to burn off a cd, and when i tried powering up it stopped during post saying

"NTLDR is missing?

ctrl + alt + del to restart"

and i can't get passed this, i'm using an ABIT IC7 mobo and haven't changed anything in the bios, so i don't understand whats wrong

please help me

bres

[Hottentot]

Could be your hard drive playing up. Hope you have backed up your essentials.
Last time I saw that message it was on my IBM deathstar HDD. In the end I had to reformat to get any sense out of it. You could boot from a floppy and try scandisk.

[Nomadd]

Which OS are you using? On Windows 2000, it should be in the root directory of you C: drive. It's about 200k. It's the 'bootstrap loader' for the operating system. If you can't boot this, then you can't get into the OS.

Sounds like your hard disk is having a few issues. Check the cables, BIOS settings, etc. Were/are you overclocking? If so, try switching things back to default. Try to get the BIOS to rescan the drive. If it's buggered, it may mean a new drive. If not, you might be able to restore it from a recover disk - you did create one of those on a floppy, didn't you?

Let us know more.

Ps. Tons of info on the M$oft site covering restoration, if your drive isn't shot.

Nomadd

[subucni]

I'm using XP, bios settings and cables are all fine, wasn't overclocking anything at all, tried clearing the bios first as i first thought it was bios related, the bios is recofnising the hdd. i don't care about having to format the drive and re-install as i planned to anyway, all the files i need were on a 2nd hdd (and better still be there ) i tried changing the bios to boot from cdrom first and then inserted my XP disc to re-install but it didn't do anything and gave the same message, i'll try again in a minute.

thanks guys

[TeePee]

Sata Raid?

[subucni]

nope, not sata raid, but the good news is that i tried changing the boot priority to cdrom again in the bios and this time it did and i'm currently re-installing XP, have no idea why this didnt work before, maybe i didnt change the settings or something after i changed them, but i swear i did, that why i thought it may have been bios related. oh well never mind, it seem to be working now. thanks again guys

[nichomach]

I hate to ask the obvious, but - my favourite cause for this? Floppy formatted in XP (or 2K or NT) machine left in drive...just a thought. Basically, the machine's found *a* drive, and can recognise the format, but can't find the bootstrap loader on that drive.

[Johnnyboy]

When you boot from a CDROM, yo
u need to hit the space bar at one point, otherwise it skips the CDROM and looks for a HDD.

[J]