NTLDR Not Found...

[Synthesthesia]

I've just turned my PC off by holding the power button after it crashed (stupid windows..) and it's came up with "NTLDR Not Found Press CTRL ALT DELETE To Reset"

I've looked around on the internet but couldn't find anything substancial, could anyone tell me what to do?

Cheers

[NeoStuey]

It sounded like some important system files are corrupted so I took a look on microsofts support page and they do have references on how to fix it. I've not been in this position myself so can't give you my own personal experience of rectifying the problem.

Try this support page for guidence;

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315233

[SubparMario]

This has happened to me a few times. A certain part of the hard disk has been corrupted due to the wobbly shutdown.

Off the top of my head, boot from the XP CD, select the recovery console and run fixmbr and fixboot

[Unwell Cat]

Not got a non bootable floppy in have you, that will cause an error like this ?

[Synthesthesia]

don't even have a floppy drive, i've got 2 hard drives and a DVD RW+ drive in. I'm going to try what's been suggested, thanks i'll repost saying how it's gone.

[Synthesthesia]

Right i've gone into that and it's asking for an administrator's password- i never set one and haven't got one. Any idea what i put in?

[Ginger Tosser]

It might depend on who built the PC. Or your password as by default you might be the admin

[Synthesthesia]

Right put these in, and now it's just stuck on the "windows xp" loading screen with a green bar going across but it just stays there for ages, i sat for 5 minutes waiting for it before i turned it off and i'm going to retry it and leave it on.

[Synthesthesia]

Yeah i built the PC myself, I just got around that however, just pressed enter, tried before but it didn't work, did it again and- It did. Man PCs are fickle

[Ginger Tosser]

Nice and secure password policy you have

[Synthesthesia]

Haha i know. It didn't work putting those prompts into the recovery console, just made it stick on the windows xp loading screen, so i've put the stuff i care about onto my second HD and i'm going to wipe it.

[Synthesthesia]

Reformatted it and it's still not working, looks like the hard drive's broken. I'll have to send it back. Thanks for replying!

[Hodge]

I`ve seen this issue quite abit in my line of work (fixing packard bell PC`s/Laptops all day) and alot of the time it is a faulty harddrive that causes the issue (loosing the system32 file is another one). It`s not by any chance a seagate drive is it . If you had access to another pc you could always download your manufacturers HDD test and run that to make sure.

[charlesr]

I got this a couple of times recently, but it was when I was messing about with ghost backup/restore. It just magically went away though.

[Unwell Cat]

look at this link it may help -

http://www.tinyempire.com/shortnotes/files/ntldr_missing.htm