NTLDR Missing error - huh?

[gretch]

Hi all,

So a couple of months ago we moved, I packed up my tower and have now unpacked it having lived on my laptop for a while.

When I unpacked it I moved my Windows installed hdd to another comp, leaving a blank hdd in, then tried to boot my tower with XP Pro in the CD drive. I got a "Please check CPU frequency in BIOS" warning on startup, then an "NTLDR missing" error. I have since checked that the jumpers are set right, made sure the boot order in the BIOS is right (CD first then hdd) and when that didn't work, installed XP Pro on the hdd in another machine, took the hdd back to my tower and booted with hdd as priority boot device, still the "NTLDR missing" error.

I suspect it is not a Windows error...

I have a Lanparty UT NF3 250Gb board, 1 Gb RAM with a SATA hdd plugged in. I haven't changed the RAM. The only other change to the "working in my last house" tower is removing the sound card and putting in another tower, but surely this would make no difference to the boot??

I have tried "Fail Safe" and "Optimised" BIOS settings, but I still get the NTLDR missing error.

Any ideas guys? What do you think is wrong?

Cheers,
gretch

 

[King107s]

Reset the CMOS and then go manually set your hardware back up to stock settings.

Also go to the following link and see if their instructions help you.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/320397

 

[Jmtyra]

The NTLDR loader error usually indicates one of a few things. Key word: usually
It's seeing your drive, else you'd get a generic "No OS found". Either your drive is failing and/or partially corrupted or somehow that file (on the root of C:, btw) has been deleted/corrupted/etc.

The MS link King provided may have some troubleshooting steps for you.

 

[QuietIce]

Bad, or going bad, HDD would be my guess as well. The only time I've seen this error personally was about a month before my C: drive started throwing errors, which ended in total failure a few months after that. HDD's can take a long time to die completely but the errors you content with while it's dying can drive you crazy.

 

[saint19]

Use your OS DVD\CD to repair the system.

 

[Seebs]

More often than not... that error means you managed to blow up your boot.ini file and the computer doesn't know which HDD/Partition to boot from.

Using your OS disk to repair the system will fix it for you.

Or you can create a boot-disk and boot into DOS prompt to see if your boot.ini file is there, corrupted or what happened to it. If it's missing/corrupted you can create a new one.