NTLDR is missing

[Tiestarian]

Hi again

Trying to build my brothers 64bit system, it's got amd athlon 64 (venice), 1gb geil ram and seagate baracuda 200gb hard drive.

I've formatted and partitioned the drive with a seagate boot disk (floppy) and now i'm trying to boot from my windows XP Pro CD but it just keeps saying:

NTLDR is missing
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

i've set the cd drive to boot first in BIOS and everything.

[EzyStvy]

If you can, let the XP install delete the partitions you created and then create new ones.

[Digitalic]

Most likely the system is having problems booting to the CD and still looking to the hardrive to boot, thus the NTLDR is missing error since you`ve formatted the drive.

Assuming your XP CD is a valid one, it may be the CD drive that is causing the problem. Do you have another CD drive you can try? To test that the XP CD is a valid one and working, try it on another PC to see if it boots.

[Tiestarian]

It was the IDE cable that was dodgy

Brand new with the motherboard but it was broken, I tried an old IDE cable I had and that worked fine.

Cheers

[HyperTF]

Since this thread was already here and I cant seem to find an answer I will ask here (hope that's ok!)

I have a well established PC (see first spec in my sig), been running fine apart from one thing... every now and then when I boot up I get the "NTLDR is missing" error and I know it isn't the case.

I have 2 hard drives, 1 SATA and 1 IDE. The SATA HAS the O/S (XP Pro), the other IDE HDD is for storage.

The only way I can get around it is to shut down, disconnect the IDE cable on the storage drive, boot up the PC to windows (which boots up fine), then shut back down, reconnect the IDE then boot up again and all is back to normal... but I know that after about another 10 boot ups it will happen again... I can live with it but it is annoying and i don't like to keep taking the side panel off (it is a quick release though.

I can only assume on boot up BIOS gets confused as to which HDD to fire up first even though I have it configured properly... could it be a case of SATA and IDE not working too well together?

Any thoughts or suggestions welcome... it has just stumped me a bit.

[patrickacox]

Everytime that I have run into the ntldr missing error it has always been bad a memory chip. I would swap out the memory and the message goes away.