Well,
again, thats the thing, the maxtor drive is set to boot first in bios, not my floppy, nor my cd drives.
I have no usb "drives" connected.
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NTLDR is missing
Hey guys, quick question for you, should be easy for some.
I recently purchased and built a new machine. Currently i'm running the following:
AMD 64 3200+
1 Gig PC3200 ram
PCIe XFX Geforece 6800 GS
1 Maxtor 160 gig drive
1 random old 40 gig drive
1 DVD/RW drive
1 DVD/CD drive
running XP SP2
Now, i know this error generally has to do with the floppy, but i have no disk in the drive. After setting everything up, (everything is configured the same as before) my drives have not changed, all my drivers are installed correctly. But AFTER I did a windows update, after the first bios bootup screen, when it starts the scan for my drives to figure out which one to boot from, i get "NTLDR is missing. please restart your computer."
Funny thing is, if i restart, i have the option to select how to bootup. I select the Maxtor drive, which is still setup as master, and it works fine..... This is why i'm so confused, if its set to master, set to the first drive to boot from, why am i getting such an error? Esp if my floppy doesn't have any disk in it..... Of course i can simply, unplug the drive, but why would i want to do that in the long run?
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Answers
Possible cause
1. Computer is booting from a non-bootable source.
2. Computer hard disk drive is not properly setup in BIOS.
3. Corrupt NTLDR and/or NTDETECT.COM file.
4. Misconfiguration with the boot.ini file.
5. Attempting to upgrade from a Windows 95, 98, or ME computer that is using FAT32.
6. New hard disk drive being added.
7. Corrupt boot sector / master boot record.
8. Seriously corrupted version of Windows 2000 or Windows XP.
9. Loose or Faulty IDE/EIDE hard disk drive cable.
http://www.computerhope.co
http://support.microsoft.c
Sounds like you either ghosted your hard drive to a new one (in the new pc) OR you simply moved a hard drive with the OS from your old pc to the new one. Is either one of those correct? If so, you may be forced to do a Windows XP installation/repair. This would require booting from the windows xp cd and selecting the 2nd "repair" option.
Mike
mcrossland,
thank you for the timely response. And no, so far i haven't ghosted the drive even though i've been meaning to. The old 40gb harddrive "had" 2000 installed on it. But since it was set to slave, i booted the master xp drive, copied over a few folders from slave and simlpy wiped the 40gig drive. Now its formatted to xp.
It's probably gunna come down to unplugging my floppy drive, but we'll see, i'll let you know of my findings when i get home.
The possible reason is the NTFS partition may not be active. Boot your computer with windows 98 CD or startup floppy and then by using fdisk set the NTFS partition as an active partition and then reboot the computer and check whether it is booting automatically with out selecting the hard disk option
Actually, all of you were right and wrong lol.
When I got home last night, I tried unplugging my floppy drive, no luck, checked the bios, everything was in order. What I did remember, and this was really stupid of me for trying it this way. I had originally transfered over the files to my maxtor drive that I wanted to save and I tried using the windows XP startup cd to partition the 40 gig hd. By the time the partition was complete, It went into trying to install xp on the new harddrive. I shut the machine off because I was not intending to do so, I just wanted to format it.
But in any case, even though I did not see any system files/folders on the drive when I booted it, it wasn't until today, when I used the format option on a drive when you are already in windows, did it fix the problem.
It must have been conflicting with the bootup somehow even though that drive is set to slave. Because before, when that drive had 2000 on it, it did not give me any problems trying to boot.
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by: csk_73Posted on 2006-03-27 at 09:05:11ID: 16302048
Hi Arka3L,
do you have any usb drive connected?
if so change the boot order so it boots first from the hard disk
Hope this helps!
Cesc