[Malaris]

I had a big problem earlier- one that resulted in me restoring my PC


My PC was running fine, I shut it down as normal.

Today, I turned it on and it came up with the DOS/command promt style font on full screen and it said in the top left hand corner;

NTLDR is missing.
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.
_




Not being able to do anything else, I obliged and restarted, but then it came back after it had restarted, the exact same message.
After doing it once more I restarted yet again but I opened the set-up menu(the BIOS edit thingy) just before it came to the aforementioned screen.

I tried anything I could think of numerous times to resolve this problem from that menu but still to no avail.

Having no idea what to do next or any means of going on the internet and finding help, I restored my original Factory settings.


The problem is now resolved and my PC is running fine (it's actually running better than fine as I had countless gigabytes of hard drive used up, and dozens of background tasks/processes running from start-up, but anyway, back to the point)

However what concerns me is the cause of this problem and that there were no 'warning signs' or symptomns of whatever happened.


1.Can anyone tell me what happened and how I could prevent this in the future?

2. What is NTLDR?

[jmmijo]

Here's what I think maybe happening, you may not like it but if you want to recover any data then I would suggest replacing the HD with a new one as I'm guessing that Windows has barfed onto the filesystem and corrupted some system files

You can attempt to do a repair install with your original Windows OS media this way it will retain most if not all of your current app settings and configuration. You will need to reinstall and later SP's and/or security patches as well as any of the latest device drivers for the mobo chipset, graphics, sound etc...

Now back to my original point, I'd do a fresh install onto a new HD and connect up that second drive and backup any data I wanted/needed to the new HD. Then I would use the diags tools that you can d/l from the HD manufacturers website to zero out the entire drive and do a reformat/check of the the whole HD.

Sometimes the whole mess gets started by hardware that is starting to flake out on you. Since I consider HD's to be pretty good with all the manufacturers now a days, there are some drives that will just fail long before their warranty period has expired, meaning 1 year on most desktop drives now
They are also pretty darn cheap and can be easily purchased from any online or brick/mortar retailer

If you have any older/smaller drives hanging around this could be a substitute, especially if your funds are in short supply...

[spiritwolf_31]

I have had the same problem. I was gone and my sis was using my pc and it froze. When I rebooted it once I returned I received the same msg..."NTLDR is Missing". My problem is it would not reboot in Win XP Pro, it would not allow me to run a system recovery, it would not allow me to reinstall. I have had to put Windows 98 SE back on. It won't even allow me to upgrade to Windows XP Pro. How do you recover that file or can you? Any suggestions would help.