NTLDR is missing

[jacamo]

A friend brought a pc round and asked me to format it for him and reinstall windows xp sp3 on so I said yes ,I inserted my xp disk and formatted his hard drive but as it was starting to install xp we had a powercut for about ten minutes when the power came back on I thought just carry on were it left off so i started the pc again now all i get is, it starts to boot and a message comes up NTLDR is missing press f1 to retry or f2 for system setup

 

the pc is a Dell optiplex gx280 ,3gb ram.intel 4 dualcore 2800

 

any help would be greatly appreciated

[Dalo Harkin]

Have you re entered the BIOS and set the first boot device to CD/DVD-ROM?

 

You may need to take the HDD out of his PC, install it in yours and then FORMAT the drive - stick it back in the other PC and do the reinstall/install

[Jelly Bean]

1. Insert the Windows XP bootable CD into the computer.
   
2. When prompted to press any key to boot from the CD, press any key.
   
3. Once in the Windows XP setup menu press the "R" key to repair Windows.
   
4. Log into your Windows installation by pressing the "1" key and pressing enter.
   
5. You will then be prompted for your administrator password, enter that password.
   
6. Copy the below two files to the root directory of the primary hard disk. In the below example we are copying these files from the CD-ROM drive letter, which in this case is "e." This letter may be different on your computer.
    
   copy e:\i386\ntldr c:\
   copy e:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\
   
7. Once both of these files have been successfully copied, remove the CD from the computer and reboot.
   

[jacamo]

1. Insert the Windows XP bootable CD into the computer.
   
2. When prompted to press any key to boot from the CD, press any key.
   
3. Once in the Windows XP setup menu press the "R" key to repair Windows.
   
4. Log into your Windows installation by pressing the "1" key and pressing enter.
   
5. You will then be prompted for your administrator password, enter that password.
   
6. Copy the below two files to the root directory of the primary hard disk. In the below example we are copying these files from the CD-ROM drive letter, which in this case is "e." This letter may be different on your computer.
    
   copy e:\i386\ntldr c:\
   copy e:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\
   
7. Once both of these files have been successfully copied, remove the CD from the computer and reboot.
   

 

Thanks jellybean that sorted it much appreciated.:D

[Jelly Bean]

You are most welcome....