After restarting your computer or you receive an ‘NTLDR is missing‘ error message and cannot get into Windows.
You will usually have no choice other than restart by pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL. but it will come to the same screen.
Now first of all you need to know about NTLDR
The NTLDR is used for most of Microsoft Windows NT operating systems, including Windows server 2003 and Windows XP.
NTLDR performs the following steps during the booting process:
- It accesses the file system present on the boot drive. It can either be a FAT file system or an NTFS file system.
If hyberfil.sys is available and it finds a hibernation image, then its contents are loaded into the memory and the system resumes where it left off. Otherwise, boot.ini is read and a boot menu is presented to the user.
If an NT-based operating system is selected, then ntdetect.com is run; it gathers the required information about the computer’s hardware. However, if a non-NT-based operating system is selected, then NTLDR checks the boot.ini file and loads the associated files.
Ntoskrnl.exe is then executed, and the information returned by ntdetect.com is passed to it.Courtesy : http://www.tech-faq.com/ntldr.html
The NTLDR is missing error message is usually caused when the following conditions exist although there are other causes of NTLDR errors:
- The primary partition is formatted with the FAT32 filesytem
- The computer starts by using INT-13 extensions
- The heads value in the FAT32 BIOS Parameter Block (BPB) does not match that of the physical disk drive
Resolution :
- Boot your system from your Windows XP CD.
- At the Installation screens select R for Repair option.
- Press the number that corresponds to the correct location for the installation of Windows you want to repair.
- Typically this will be #1
- Enter in the administrator password when requested (Generally it’s none)
- Enter in the following commands (CDDrive: is replaced by the actual drive letter)
- COPY CDDrive:i386NTLDR C:
- COPY CDDrive:i386NTDETECT.COM C:
- Reboot your system.