What exactly does “NTLDR is missing” mean?
When your computer starts, the BIOS attempts to find the primary hard drive’s active partition to read the first sector for the MBR (Master Boot Record), it uses that info to load the rest of the OS. For Windows NT4/2k/XP the NTLDR (New Technology Loader) takes it from there. If you get the “NTLDR is missing, press any key to restart” what’s most likely going on is the BIOS either didn’t look for the right drive, didn’t find the right partition, it wasn’t active, didn’t find the MBR, or the MBR didn’t list NTLDR in the right place, the location of NTLDR changed, or you are looking at a hardware failure situation (memory/cables/drive/motherboard/etc). Windows Vista does not boot this way, you can still use my floppy to boot into an existing installation of 98/nt/xp, but I’ve not had a chance to test Windows Vista. http://tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm The above link has
