NTLDR not found error...

S

Stugots

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Feb 25, 2004
Messages
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What exactly causes the NTLDR not found error. I've seen this happen on countless systems and sometimes I've been able to replace NTLDR and it will work again, other times not.

This happened last night to a friend of mine, and I know that when I talk to him he's going to know what causes it.
 
It could be as simple as you having an external drive plugged in and set to boot before the HDD does.
 
read up on your MOBOs forums (hopefully they have forums) and see if a bios update will help.
 
It is not booting from another device. I won't be able to run chkdsk because I can't boot into windows anymore.
 
ive had this from a bad master boot record, try booting to a bootablle disk and do a fdisk /mbr

and after doing support for so many years i have to ask, are you SURE there are no disks in the system at all? sorry


err....nm on the fdisk /mbr.... now that im thinking about it, thats for fat partitions, not ntfs, sorry
 
slave the hard drive into another pc or get a bootable cd such as ERD commander

or boot from the WINXP cd and go into the recovery console
 
it could also just be a loose power cable or ide cable plugged into the hardrive (or ide to the mobo) reseating those is always a good first step

clark
 
He just put a large amount of electrical equipment in the room with the computer, amplifiers, head units, etc, etc. I was wondering if maybe powering on one of those cause a brown-out in the room which may have caused the corruption.
 
Highly Unlikely. (possible though...)


Is his drive old by any chance?

Maybe he overclocked too much....
 
He doesn't overclock. He's running a Dell P3 733, 512mb ram, TNT2 Ultra, 2x20gb the storage drive I suspect may be defective, he said it made a strange clicking sound a few weeks ago but hasnt since.
 
i fogot to mention: what cleared up my NTLDR error on my very, very flaky abit board was clearing the cmos. consider trying that.
 
acascianelli said:
He doesn't overclock. He's running a Dell P3 733, 512mb ram, TNT2 Ultra, 2x20gb the storage drive I suspect may be defective, he said it made a strange clicking sound a few weeks ago but hasnt since.
Click to expand...

the drive is dying... It will continue to get errors like that until it finally passes away for good...
 
chinoquezada said:
the drive is dying... It will continue to get errors like that until it finally passes away for good...
Click to expand...

So it's most likely the potentially defective drive? I had a feeling it was that, I'm sure he'll be delighted to know that his drive with all his MP3's on it is dying.
 
acascianelli said:
So it's most likely the potentially defective drive? I had a feeling it was that, I'm sure he'll be delighted to know that his drive with all his MP3's on it is dying.
Click to expand...
If i'm correct he can still save the data if he slaves it on another computer... A cousin of mine had the same problem and his data was saved. (the drive did die though....)
 
A simple check to make sure you don't have a floppy in the drive. I have gotten that message before and it was a floppy in the slot. Can't hurt to look. :)
 
MajorDomo said:
A simple check to make sure you don't have a floppy in the drive. I have gotten that message before and it was a floppy in the slot. Can't hurt to look. :)
Click to expand...
Really?

Why would the Motherboard search for the NTLDR in a floppy? Some kind of legacy support?
 
Haven't the faintest clue as to why, but it has happened to me on several occasions and drove me nuts. Doesn't happen all of the time, but it does happen. Most of the time I get the 'Invalid boot device, hit any key to continue' thingy in XP. YMMV ;)

chinoquezada said:
Really?

Why would the Motherboard search for the NTLDR in a floppy? Some kind of legacy support?
Click to expand...
 
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