I left my PC on last night and this morning it had rebooted and was saying"NTLDR missing press ctrl, alt and del to restart"
I restarted and it says the same again.

I have checked the BIOS and that seems ok, I have checked the leads for the HDD's and they are ok.

Next I tried to run the recovery thing from the windows xp home CD. I dont know my admin password though as i have never set one up. Is there a default password i don't know about?

Is there anything else I can do to fix the NTLDR problem, please help. :confused:

Check that you don't have a disk in any floppy or CD/DVD drives, I know it doesn't make sense but I had this once from leaving a disk in a drive and forgetting about it.

If you haven't set up an administrator password it will be blank.

I did check all the drives and they were all empty, i will go and have a try now just leaving the admin password blank. Thanks

Adlinds....if you're trying to do a system restore, you don't need your CD....Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, System Restore....and you don't need a password for that, so long as you have Administrator rights on your pc.

Hope this helps.

Originally posted by Ann_x
Hope this helps.
Doubt it, Windows isn't booting because it's having problems with a particular file, hence the Windows recovery from CD as that's the only thing that will boot.

Originally posted by Lurch
Doubt it, Windows isn't booting because it's having problems with a particular file, hence the Windows recovery from CD as that's the only thing that will boot. I should have thought that Windows has rebooted because Adlinds has been asked to use ctrl-alt-delete....I didn't think that would have come up if Windows wasn't working.

May be wrong, however.

This message would normaly come up if you had another disk in the drive, but as you said, you've already checked this. What is the bios saying when you do an automatic serch for the harddrive, is it still saying it's there (ie. its not corrupt). If you can get to the recovery console try running chkdsk /r

Have you also tried running 'the last known good configuration' via f8

The normal default password is administrator, password is blank. If thats not it, well is this a pre-loaded system or have you re-installed before? Some pre-installs (especially dell) have some bugs where you can't get into the admin on the recovery console. Contact you're vendor if so.

If that's all okay try, copying back all your vital system files via the following commands in the recovery console: (press enter after each line)

copy c:\windows\system32\config\system c:\windows\tmp\system.bak
copy c:\windows\system32\config\software c:\windows\tmp\software.bak
copy c:\windows\system32\config\sam c:\windows\tmp\sam.bak
copy c:\windows\system32\config\sercurity c:\windows\tmp\security.bak
copy c:\windows\system32\config\default c:\windows\tmp\default.bak
delete c:\windows\system32\config\system
delete c:\windows\system32\config\software
delete c:\windows\system32\config\sam
delete c:\windows\system32\config\security
delete c:\windows\system32\config\default
copy c:\windows\repair\system c:\windows\system32\config\system
copy c:\windows\repair\software c:\windows\system32\config\software
copy c:\windows\repair\sam c:\windows\system32\config\sam
copy c:\windows\repair\security c:\windows\system32\config\security
copy c:\windows\repair\default c:\windows\system32\config\default

Waaaiiiiitttt......

Have you tried the MS method of fixing this problem?


URLS:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkd_tro_bohs.asp

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prmb_tol_zldj.asp



Discussion about this file being missing is @ http://www.techimo.com/forum/t37563.html



Seems to relate to a corrupt MBR.

Tried all the methods suggested plus many more I found on the web and still didn't get anywhere. Eventually reinstalled windows while keeping the same file system so i didnt loose any work. Thanks for all your help but I am still baffled why it happened.

the boot sector was damaged, i'd do a scan of the disk and make a backup of your data ASAP. it could be symptomatic of a disk that is about to die.

Boot from an XP cd, and choose the recovery console option, then run chkdisk (or is it chkdsk) one of the two. See if it solves anything.

Joel