Re: Missing ntldr

widman wrote:

Trying to follow the article on booting from a CD and copying the two recommended files (ntldr and ntdetect) from the CD I was limited by the fact that my Windows CD is a Toshiba reinstall only. It want's to format and reinstall everything, which is sometimes fine, but not what I want to do if not necessary.

I took the drive out and put it in a USB case connected to another Toshiba running the same version of windows and tried copying the two files from the working Toshiba to the second drive, but it still does not boot. Still says it can't find the ntldr file.

The only difference in the files in the root directory is the non-booting one does not have a pagefile.

What is the next step?

Assuming that you have verified in the BIOS to make sure that you are booting to the proper drive or device and that the disk is not corrupt, other possibilities are that on a multi partition disk the active flag has been remove from the System partition or that the boot sector is damaged.

If the laptop has a floppy drive the easiest thing to try now is to boot with a boot floppy, see here for information on how to create one: http://www.nu2.nu/bootdisk/ntboot/ If the laptop has no floppy drive try here: http://tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm.

If you can boot with the startup boot disk use the Disk Management tool and check the active status of the partition containing the boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect.com files, it should be showing as the System partition. You can also use a W98 startup disk and use fdisk to verify the active status of the partitions.

If the active flags is OK then repair the boot sector by booting to the Recovery Console and issuing the FIXBOOT command on the system partition.

John

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