NTLDR Not Found - Ctrl Alt Delete!

[jack brew]

I get the current error message on my Desktop PC. It has XP, and I think the CMOS battery ran out as it kept resetting the date to 2006. I replaced the battery but now the above message keeps appearing. Windows will load - but only if the start-up disk is in the drive.

Anyone shine a light? How do I replace this file?

Danke Shun!

 

[beowulf]

Does not sound like fun.

Have a look at these links:

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/findbyerrormessage/a/ntldrmissingxp.htm

http://www.techwarelabs.com/community/showthread.php?t=11400

The PCSupport like has a complete walkthrough of trivial to full on serious rebuild. But reading this it could be that the CMOS thing was not related.

Good luck.

 

[pie sandwich]

On boot, if you press Del (could be different on your comp) to enter the BIOS, and find the boot section, it will give you a choice of devices to boot first, (boot priority).

If you only have one HDD then make sure this is at the top, or make sure it is ticked, then press F10 to save and exit from BIOS.

It should reboot normally, if that fails then reboot and on the post screen select boot device or boot priority (could be F4 or F8 computer dependent) and this will take you to a blue screen with a list of devices attached to your mother board, and using the arrow keys select the HDD that your OS is on and press enter, it will reboot and should start normally.

Try not to mess with any other settings in the BIOS, this will only confuse matters.
And the best bit is its easy, and not scary, so dont worry about braking your computer DT_Xtremez_30:


See if that works, if not let us know what it says or does.

 

[Mightierthan]

I would also recommend checking the hard drive cables; you may have inadvertantly loosened one when replacing the battery. A loose (or faulty) IDE/EIDE cable can cause this error.

 

[monobrow]

Believe it or not, the windows repair facility might fix this...

Boot with your XP cd and after the 10 minuites of loading stuff, get yourself to the repair console. It'll ask you what windows installation you want to repair and a password if needed, firstly see if you can check/repair the disk using this command

CHKDSK C: /f

That will check and fix bad sectors but might not work in the repair console, so you may have to boot into windows somehow to do this. Other than that though you can try two other fix commands...

FIXBOOT
FIXMBR

This will re-write the boot sector and the master boot record for the disk. If it's not working now it won't make it any worse to try them!!!