THIS IS THE SECOND TIME THIS HAPPENED. Just put in a clean new version of xp about 3 days ago, last nite the system locked, rebooted and got ntldrmissing..press....etc...put in xp, went to R...wanted admin password....no password..(no friggin luck)...never put one in...i orig partitioned the drive into c,d,e,f...with external hd as G...two opticals as H and I..now windows is on D...every partition has a different letter, i can reformat and install xp, but afraid this will happen again. AND....... there is an 8mb partition on the HD that can't be deleted that says "can't delete, windows needs this to install", and it just sits there by itself.
Go hard drive shopping. I bet when you look at your hard drive set up you get very high numbers for free space ie partition 1 235 gig free. These are signs of a dying hard drive. To confirm go into your BIOS and enable SMART in the advanced settings. The bios should detect hd failure when you reboot. -Del
still download diagnostic program & run it to make certain no problem with hd. is the drive jumpered for master or cable select??
The times I have seen that error is when something has changed to affect your boot.ini Normally you have a line in it like: default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS That basically tells it to boot off the first IDE hard drive and first partition. On your system it might have been partition (2) if you had it installed on the D: drive. Basically the boot.ini tells it where to find the boot partition and files and ntloader is one of them. If it gets reset to the default, it would be looking on the C: drive for the system files, not the partition where they actually reside. If it happens again, boot with the XP CD and go into the recovery console and check the boot.ini and make sure it is correct.
NTLDR has nothing to do with Boot.INI...NTLDR is its own file in the series of three boot files needed to boot the system.... 1.Bot.INI 2.NTLDR 3.NTDetect.COM IF it says NTLDR missing either theres a floppy disk in the A: drive that is unbootable, or that particular file has become corrupted...replacing the file from another computer back on to the C: drive of the problem computer it should boot...... bklyn1028 if you keep having this problem then you may have a corrupted version of XP as ive know people who have had corrupted versions and had same problems....
JaydeeX3, you are mistaken. The ARC Path in boot.ini file is what tells the computer where ntldr and the other system files are located during bootup. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q102873 So actually it has everything to do with ntldr since the computer will be unable to find it while booting if the ARC path is incorrect and so give the error message that the original poster was getting. While there are other possible causes, I have seen that one happen many times when someone installed Windows on D: instead of C:. For some reason the ARC path in boot.ini gets reset to look at the first partition.
ok....how about this, i am running very nicely now, with the same windows xp i bought from zipzoomfly, but it's an oem, not sure if that was the problem, but seems to be fine right now. Another thing i had , was all the shortcuts on the desktop wouldn't work, had to re-install the programs. but seems to be stable now. Microsoft is sending me a pro disk, waiting for it. now here is another issue. i have a 120gb hitachi sata running fine. i just got another of the same hd, want to install it and set up raid 0...so....do i just plug in the second HD and set up raid, or wait for the microsoft disk, and start from scratch? Doesn't matter which one i do, just want this perfect. thank for all your help
guess what, that is exactly what i did...from scratch....running beautifully.....i'm a friggin genius.....lol
