Okay... So I have been working on an old Dell XPS 200. I know, they are garbage and I should just throw it away and buy a new pc.. But, I am broke, have no job at the moment and it was free.
When I got the pc it was not working, the sata hdd had two OS on it (windows XP and ME) and could not for the life of me get a XP disk to work to start over.
So I moved the hdd over to my working computer, fortunately it had sata drive ports bult in so no hassle there, and formatted the 80gb seagate sata hdd as a ntfs. No problems formatting. So I plug it into the dell again, put in the cd and I start up xp. I giggled a bit when I thought I had fixed it within the first day of having it. But then it said no drive detected. I looked online and saw hundreds of people giving secrets and tips on how to install xp onto a sata hdd. So when I finally chose one explaining to turn the hdd settings to ata, an error popped up, "NTLDR is missing Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart _" So I do, same thing pops up.
I go back into my bios and change the settings back to normal and still the error pops up. I have the bios already set to boot from the cd/dvd drive first but it skips right past it. I tried other xp cds but no luck at all. I tried formatting it again and the message repeats "NTLDR is missing". I thought it was the cd/dvd drive but it is working, the bios is still set to boot from cd, I have NO floppy drive, the xps 200 does not have/support one, and I have been pulling my hair out trying to fix this problem. Thinking I may need to resort to voodoo sacrifice next. Haha.
Oh, and I apologize for any spelling errors. I have been up all night trying to figure this out...
NTLDR is missing means it's booting from the hard disk, and not finding an OS (or a working OS) there - if you haven't yet installed windows and are trying to load the windows install CD, it's not finding the CD. Have you tested the Win XP PC in another PC? Is it a legal copy? This isn't for reporting software piracy purposes, this is because downloaded versions of Windows often aren't bootable, which is when this problem occurs.
Yes, I have tried the CD on two other corpse/test computers I have to check my boot disks/toy around etc. I have them in the same situation, formatted hard drives the same way and had no problems with them.
If this is a copied disc i have come across a few CD\DVD drives that for some reason or other have a problem reading certain copied discs, even though other drives read them no problem.
The easiest thing for you to do regardless if a copied disc or not is shot the CD\DVD drive in from your other system (checking first that the XP disc will boot OK in that system) temporarily to find out, if it reads the disc-install XP.
IF it still does not boot, at least it will eliminate both drive and CDR.
