NTLDR Not Found

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scottyhuff

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Hi folks,

Here's my issue. When I turned on my computer today, instead of booting, it gave me a "NTLDR Not Found. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" message. I rebooted, went to setup and noticed that instead of my boot HD showing up as Primary Master, it shows up as Third Slave. Nothing changed. Nobody got into the case and messed with anything. I then booted from an XP CD. I can access the HD from there and everything appears to be ok. Still, I have no way of telling the BIOS to read that drive first.

What'cha think?

My PC is a generic build machine with XP home. Two Hard drives and Two CD Roms. Been running fine for 2 years. BTW, the other drives still show up in their proper place in terms of the BIOS (2nd HD as Primary Slave, 1st CD as Secondary Master, 2nd CD as Secondary Slave). I'll send along the BIOS info once I get home after work this eve.

Thanks for any help.

...Scotty
 
That sounds a bit like some cmos information was lost since the boot order for drives is set and saved in the bios setup. After 2 full years of use the battery on the board may be weak and need replacement or something may have effected the bios programming.

The first thing would going into the bios to see what drive is set as the default boot device there. You may find the second hard drive set as default upon looking.
 
Funny thing is, the CMOS shows all drives. However, it has nothing listed for the Primary HD Master and doesn't allow me to choose the drive. The only option is to Auto Detect, or choose one of the other drives. My master hard drive shows up as the third drive, but not available to choose as primary.

:-&
 
Do you have a separate boot tab when in the bios? Or are you seeing a set of options next to each drive? If you have the separate boot or boot order tab seen where you scroll across and open to see floppy, cd rom or optical drive, above hard drives you highlight the hard drive item and press enter to bring up the list of hard drives installed.

If you have that list and should only see the two hard drives you highlight the OS drive and move it to the top there. That will set it as the default boot drive. The other section should see hard drive set as the 1st not cd rom or floppy.

All this depends on how the bios is layed out there not knowing the make and model board and which bios like Phonix - Award, AMI, or another. Knowing the drive is still good points to the boot order settings having seen a change somehow.
 
You could try running chkdsk /r. That might repair it, or you could run fixboot and fixmbr if chkdsk /r doesn't take care of it.
 
If it was a simple problem with the boot information then booting up to the recovery console to set the check disk with the repair switch would be the option. But if you look a little closer this is a problem being seen in the bios.
 
The OP is not able to move it up in boot priority, so I suggested what I did. Hey, it only takes a few minutes to run a chkdsk /r to see if it would help.
 
The manual expansion of the ntldr file would be the first thing suggested at the recovery console if the drive was being seen as the default boot device.

Apparently the bios is seeing the OS drive as the third drive not available for being set as the default boot device. Typically however that should be seeing the "invalid boot device" message if the bios is looking at the second HD or one of the optical drives at post.
 
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