Dreaded NTLDR is Missing!

I just built a computer from scratch and it took me....12 hours to get windows installed. Don't ask, its a long story and it concludes with a faulty ide cable....

Anyways, I got windows XP Pro installed but when I boot from start, it says...NTLDR is missing.

But when I restart and press F8, and click on my hard drive, it boots up fine.

Which is odd b/c in the boot priority is cd-rom, than hard driver, than nothing else.

How do I fix this?

And windows recovery is not an option.

Thanks in advance!!

 

Have you tried using the windows repair utility on the actual xp pro disk?

 

Put in your windows repair disk and let it boot off of it till it gets to the screen that says

1. Install Os(bla bla bla)
2. Exit
3. bla
4. bla

then click on install os (it will give you an option to repair from this screen(dont select that option(then tell xp setup to continue and then it should give you another option to repair windows click this one and the xp disk will scan the windows folder for corrupted or missing files and fix it.

If worst comes to worst you can use norton commander(A very old dos utility for easily copying the system files from a floppy disk to the hdd.

Update Me

 

Here is the link to get Norton Commander

http://www.altap.cz/salam_en/norton_commander.html

 

It will run in dos if that doesnt matter

it will run just like a windows 98 boot floppy
then copy the files you need

 

More than likely your boot.ini is incorrect or corrupt. Thats what tells Windows where the system files are located.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311578/EN-US/
That link tells how to edit boot.ini for Windows 2000, but XP is the same.

Norton Commander won't work if booted off of a DOS or 98 disk on an NTFS file system. A Windows 98 or DOS boot disk will not read NTFS partitions so Norton Commander would not be able to read it either. NC will work fine if his filesystem is Fat32, though it still will only support 8.3 filenames.