PCA Forums

Ok Guys.. I'm NT stupid here. My dad said last night the power went out, and when he got up this morning his computer said he saw "NTLDR missing". He did a little of his own research and found out it's the loader file for NT (duh lol) and that he could possibly fix the problem by rebooting with a "backup disk". Does this mean a typical boot disk, or the actual install disk? I have no idea. My dad is in MD, and I'm in LA so I can't ust go over there and fiddle with it myself. I told him to check out bootdisks.com to see if they had anything there. But he bought the computer from the base he works at, was one of their old computers, so naturally it came with nothin' to help him out. I told him I could send him a disk with a different operating system on it, but I don't have NT. I also thought maybe if he found this file on the net he could simply save it to a floppy and copy it back to the location it belongs in.. Is that possible? If it is, and one of you guys can tell me where it goes, and could email me the file so I can send it on to him, I'd GREATLY appreciate it. LMK what my options are.. TIA eGo

ok, it sounds like ntloader is corrupt or possibly missing
heres how to go about fixing it

boot from your win2k or xp cd whatever it may be

choose to do a repair (R)

Choose a manual repair (M)

Start the manual repair
Insert your backup floppy if you have it, if not press (L) to skip i think

The repair will compare files to the ones on the disc, so you wanna skip any repair of files thats not ntloader because they have probably been altered by service packs etc..

repair ntloader when it is found
after that press (f3) to exit- windows will bitch about not being done, but its only nessisary to fix whats broken

If this is success, and you cab boot into windows, run a complete virus scan immediatly, NTLoader is often a victum of virii
hope this helps

This may sound stupid, but have him check to make sure there's no floppy in the floppy drive,. You will get that same error if there's a non-bootable floppy in there formatted on an NT-based OS.

9 times out of 10 that's the problem when you get that message.

Stupid really - I can't understand why Microsoft can't just put a message in there like 'Non-bootable floppy in drive"

Something like that. But he doesn't have the CD unfortunatly. So I may have to have him to a full install of a different OS, it's his home computer. But I don't know what all he has on the drive that he might be afraid of losing. So this could turn out to be an interesting endeavor.. I may just send him an XPro cd and have him install that, as I think it will be a lot more stable. But if anybody else has an easier solution, or things the other thing I suggested about the command prompt will work, I'm still open to other ideas. THANX! PS Thanx for the idea BillyGoat, if he had the disk, it would work perfectly! eGo


***edit*** Hey, thanx for that FP, I'll make sure he does that.. eGo It was early morning, so it's possible he didn't notice that.. lol

Forgot about that one FP- if floppy is first boot device, that can happen

I just reinstall the OS when it does that. Thankfully, my only NT box, the ol' K6-233 doesn't do that very often.

ive gotten past my rush to format days, if i can solve my problems with 20 mins worth of work and keepmy existing apps so be it- this beiing said 2 years on this install of xp, pretty soon ill probably get the inch to start fresh-been spoiled though