HELP with ntldr warning !!!!

I belong to another forum (shhh) and after 250+ they are clueless, so I'm putting you to the test. My son had a computer with 98se on it. We got a 2000 mulit-user disk to upgrade his, my daughters (also running 98) and my desktop (withe the awardwinning, wonderful ME,lol). Anyhow I did an upgrade on mine (me) and it's fine. He did a fresh install and had 2 o/s on it. The others walked me through on how to delete everything. I erased the hd using the seagate disks that I downloaded to 2 floppies, so it it completely bare with nothing on it at all. I am trying to reboot to the 2000 cd disk. My ribbons are set up correctly to the ide and the bios are set. I have an atx mb I guess, model L7vmm2. It is reading my hd and my cd/dvd. I have 3 different cdroms, but only have one hooked up. Each is set to primary on it's own ide. ANYHOW, when I go to boot order, i do the cd/dvd0, and ide0. I have a floppy too, on the smaller type of ide connection. Anyhow,I guess what it comes down to is it is trying to find a network. When I go to the bios and either put in auto or press f3, both of which try to find drives, it reads both of them, but instead of auto or hdd , it shows user on my hdd. Is there a way around this on how to shut of network boot (If this is indeed the problem)? Now, I do sound like I know what i"m doing, that is only because of how many posts I had to go through. I follow directions well, but please don't use too many technical words, as I'm just learning the ins and outs of "the guts of computers". LOL Thanks in advance

So your saying that when your computer boots up that it's trying to boot off of the network instead of booting off of your hard drive?



You don't need to use the software for your hard drives. Windows 2000 setup can wipe your hard drives perfectly fine.

It sounds to me like you never installed Windows 2000 after you wiped the disks so the computer is just following the boot order and trying to boot off of the network.


Finally, why are you upgrading from Windows ME to Windows 2000 in the year 2006? You are going from a POS garbage OS that should have never been released to an OS that is pretty soon to have support dropped from it by Microsoft. If you were somehow able to put up with Windows ME for all this time then you should just go ahead and put up with Windows XP. Windows XP has all of the annoyingness of Windows ME but at least it's stable and it is actually for home use, whereas Windows 2000 was never intended for home I use.


Well I guess the reason that your upgrading to 2000 is because you didn't actually pay for it and you want a better operating system for your computer. I hate to say it but if you cannot troubleshoot the problem that you are experienceing ATM then you should probably have left well enough alone and just bought a new computer.

No, I wanted to upgrade because for one, Me had TONS of problems. Another reason was because for the kids alot of stuff they wanted to download required 2000 or above.So,is there a way to shut off the network part if it?? No, I did install 2000, well, my son did, then I deleted both from the seagate floppies, so now there isn't anything. i'm trying to boot from the cdrom with the windows 2000 in it. Any clues?? I'm guessing it wants network, one,from the message I get, two, is that in the bios it goes to user,not auto for the hd .

When you boot off of a 2000 CD it should have a prompt when your booting that say's "Press any key to boot from CD.." (this only applies if there is no OS on the hard drive (that's not quite correct it's actually the MBR but I'm not going to go into specifics).

If you don't see this prompt then it's one of 2 things:

1. You cannot boot from your CD because it doesn't have that ability or was copied incorrectly.
2. Your BIOS does not have the option to boot from CD before booting from your hard drive or the network.


The problem is not disabling the network boot (although you can do this). The problem is you need to boot from the CD if the CD has that capability.

Been a while since I've been around 2000, never touched ME, but can't you just download a 98 bootdisk from bootdisk.com, boot from the floppy, swap over to your CD drive with the 2000 CD in it, type in "setup.exe" and install 2000?

Man, I can't remember the last time I booted off a floppy, I don't even have a floppy in my current system.

Yeah, I think you can do that. Remember people doing that 5-6 years ago because they kept on leaving the CD session open which left the CD unbootable. :rolleyes: Noobs.

well,i tried both with no success. I tried going to winboot and got a floppy off of that, no success. Then I read to do if off the 2000 cd, so I put in my cd in a working computer and did the boot disks off that, 4 of them. I went to my bios and set up floppy, then hd, then ide0, put in the floppy#1, and restarted. (is that right)then when it started i got the same message. There is nowhwere on any screen to type in anything

Looking at this thread, I have some questions.

When you say that you got the same message, what message are you referring to? Is it the message that you said in the title of your thread, the ntldr warning? If so, you are not booting off a valid boot disk, or off the Windows 2000 cd, or this is not a valid Windows 2000 boot cd. Apparently the boot sector is still resident on the hard drive and trying to find the Windows boot information files. You are not booting from the CD, but from the hard drive, which has no good copy of Windows on it. You may have erased the partition on the hard drive, but not the MBR.

When you made the Winboot floppy, did you invoke the exe file to make the floppy, or simply place the exe file directly on a floppy? If the latter, you are not booting from the floppy, rather from the hard drive, which still has the MBR resident on it. The Winboot utility must be invoked from Windows, which then prompts you to put in a floppy and goes on tomake a bootable floppy disk.

If this is a ECS L7vmm2 motherboard that you have, the boot order in the bios should be the cd as the first boot device, then the hard drive, if you are trying to boot from the Windows 2000 boot cd.

If booting off a valid Win 98 boot disk made from the Winboot utility, then the first order boot device in the bios should be the floppy drive. This should bring you to a command prompt. You then need to change to the drive designation for the cd drive and execute the setup command that Relic spoke about.

Let me know if I am off base on this, but it sounds like one of these problems is the issue.

that bios is still screwed up somehow?, can you even boot to floppy A drive? I thought you couldnt, but I dont remember. Yeah this one guy sounds like he may have had an idea, maybe, basically boot to A, then type in e:win2000 setup or whatever the command is, good idea maybe, but you have to be able to boot to some drive. you still will have to get the bios sorted out, anyway good luck.

true you can use just win2000 disk however using the hdd makers utility has some advantages, for one u can check the drive for errors etc, and 2 it does a format in about 2 seconds as compared with several minutes for windows to do it, no big deal though either way, just a perference, just dont use win9X disk to format for ntfs.

OK , reading your posts, I have a 2000 cd AND I made 4 disks(floppy) off of each. It had options, bootdisk or bootdk32, so I did the first choice. The WHOLE problem is no matter how I set up the bios,the computer will not boot to ANY drive, either the disks or the cd in the cdrom. The cdrom does work because when I put it in any other computer, it pops right up. The disk drive worked a month ago, so I'm sure that is OK. What's next to do??

OK , reading your posts, I have a 2000 cd AND I made 4 disks(floppy) off of each. It had options, bootdisk or bootdk32, so I did the first choice. The WHOLE problem is no matter how I set up the bios,the computer will not boot to ANY drive, either the disks or the cd in the cdrom. The cdrom does work because when I put it in any other computer, it pops right up. The disk drive worked a month ago, so I'm sure that is OK. What's next to do??

Do the floppy disks work in another computer? I remember an issue a long time ago (affects XP too) where when I created bootable floppy disks in 2000/XP that they would not actually be bootable. Only way around it was to write from a floppy image using Winimage or to create the boot disks on another computer.