NTLDR missing - whole new scenario
 

Hi, and thanks for reading. I also apologise for posting another topic on missing NTLDR, but I have read most of the other topics and found nothing to help me.

Here is my situation:
I have a Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop, 333mHz, with 64MB of RAM (i think) DVD drive, floppy, and 6GB hard drive. The problem is that most of the keys on the keyboard no longer work (they produce random characters), and for some reason it does not accept a PS-2 keyboard. I am, however, able to edit things in the BIOS without any issues.

The HDD being blank, and me being unable to used command prompt to install anything, I had a friend take the HDD, put it in his laptop and install Windows ME, and then upgrade to XP Pro.

Now, the HDD is back in my laptop, but it reports the NTLDR as missing every time I boot it.

I have tried a number of things including: booting from a floppy with the boot.ini, NTDETECT.COM and ntldr files; booting from the XP CD (which i dont think is s bootable), and removing the HDD, placing it in an external case and manually checking (the boot.ini file) and copying those three files from my other XP Pro system.

Your suggestions are valued... i will try anything!

Thanks again,
Bob[/url]

It is not recognizing the boot files (NTLDR, NTDETECT, etc.) because the when OS was installed, the hard drive was in a different hardware location (which parallel/serial port, which hard drive, which partition) than the location it is currently in. It will look in the wrong place. You can try editing the boot.ini file yourself, but you will come across other problems. I would suggest setting the boot order of your laptop to boot to your DVD drive first, and do a clean installation of XP Pro. If you need help with this we can give you plenty of assistance.