NTLDR is Missing

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Author Message   Joan Citizen Username: Joancrystal Post Number: 1763 Registered: 5-2001 Posted on Saturday, July 12, 2003 - 11:21 am:        The offspring needs to access data on his hard drive pronto so he can print out copies of his portfolio for some upcoming job interviews. When he turns on his computer, he receives the following error message: NTLDR is missing. He is running Windows 2000. There are no disks in any of his drives. Any advice would be appreciated.   lseltzer Citizen Username: Lseltzer Post Number: 1630 Registered: 5-2001 Posted on Saturday, July 12, 2003 - 12:06 pm:        99 times out of 100 this means that there is a non-bootable floppy in the drive, so check that again. If there are no drives then there is a big problem with the Windows 2000 instalation on the drive. You need to boot to the Windows 2000 CD and proceed through the installation procedure to the point where you have an option to Repair the installation. See Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q318728 for much more detail on this. There are some other possibilities: If you had copied a large number of files to the root directory you can get this message. See Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q320397   Joan Citizen Username: Joancrystal Post Number: 1765 Registered: 5-2001 Posted on Saturday, July 12, 2003 - 4:20 pm:        Larry: Thank you so much for the quick and thorough response. I passed your suggestions on to the offspring. I'll let you know what happens. Joan   Joan Citizen Username: Joancrystal Post Number: 1825 Registered: 5-2001 Posted on Saturday, August 2, 2003 - 1:06 pm:        Just spoke with offspring to ask how computer was doing. He tells me that there are multiple bad sectors within the 1st 8,000 sectors of the hard drive (where the boot sector is). He is trying to use a data restoration program to back up the data. Once this is done, a friend is going to try to fix the hard drive or partition off the bad sectors. Thanks again for your help.   #9Dream Citizen Username: 9dream Post Number: 531 Registered: 12-2002 Posted on Monday, August 4, 2003 - 9:27 am:        Bad sectors could mean the drive is going. Rather than repartitioning the drive, he should seriously consider replacing it.