Craig Mayhew’s Blog

I came across the missing NTLDR error when I was rebuilding a machine to run folding@home. It needed the power supply replacing as it had recently failed (gone bang!). At the same time it damagaed some of the filesystem on the hard disk.

To fix the error:

1. Insert the Windows XP bootable CD into the computer.
2. When prompted to “press any key to boot from the CD”, press any key.
3. Once in the Windows XP setup menu press the “R” key to repair Windows.
4. Log into your Windows installation by pressing the “1″ key and pressing enter.
5. You may then be prompted for your administrator password, if it asks then enter that password.
6. Copy the below two files to the root directory of the primary hard disk (usually the c:\ drive). In the below example I am copying the files from the CD-ROM drive, which in this case is “e:\”. This letter may be different on your computer.

copy e:\i386\ntldr c:\
copy e:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\

7. Once both of these files have been successfully copied, remove the CD from the computer and reboot.

Hopefully that should solve the problem for you. Although in my case it was fairly obvious why the hard disk had been slightly corrupted, This error although fixed may be caused by any number of serious problems such as a partially corrupted hard disk, so it’s worth taking a backup of anything important and investigating further.