My girlfriends dads Packard Bell computer running XP OS has an issue at start up. Instead of running the usual start up he only gets a screen saying NTLDR is missing, press ctrl - alt - delete to restart. On doing this nothing happens.
I cannot get in to safe mode or any other part of the operating system so am well and truly stuck. Can anyone help with this?
Thanks for the link. I made the boot disk and on using option 3 got into the system. However without the disk the same error kept coming up. I tried all other options, copy files over to the C: drive and putting in windows folder etc. The system still wouldnt boot correctly without the ISO file disk.
I also tried a system restore to a month previous but the restore couldnt complete for some reason. I then ran a chkdsk r C:, this took around an hour. On restart of the system i got an error saying windows root>\system 32\hal.dll
Can anyone offer anymore advice on how i could fix this permanently without the need for the boot disk constantly?
Thanks for the quick reply. The problem i have is that i do not have access to a Windows XP disk so cannot use the repair option. Also if i use the repair option will i lose any files, photos etc i have?
Perhaps someone you know has an XP CD.
You could download TinyXP with repair option (note that I have used TinyXP to install a working system, but I have not tried a repair)
The repair should not wipe the the drive - but as in all things PC, important files should be backed up first.
press f8 on restart or f10 or f11 with any luck it'll have a recovery console if it does look for repair option read screen very carefully before executing in case you mistakenly go into destructive mode (reformat & wipe all data)
lmao...you don't have a floppy or cd still left in the bays do you or a card reader or some other external device attached
You could use ntldr from another xp machine you will have to unhide C contents & copy them over it would also pay to check the boot.ini file is still there, line should read as follows,if you have recovery partition before C,then rdisk should read rdisk(1)partition(2) on both lines. The partition is where C is,any wording between these " " can be changed to whatever you want
[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
It would be better to remove his hdd & recover any data that way & then do a complete reinstall this time however use an imaging program to create a full working backup image of C,macrium reflect is free tho my personal choice is acronis 11 however it is cpu intensive so you may have to use an early version or ghost 12 or 15
