NTLDR is missing insert disk?

First thing to do, is make shure that he has'nt got a disc in his floppy drive. After that boot to the repair section on the windows cd and do a fix boot and fix mbr.
 
Jimbo said:
do you just type in fixmbr and that's it?
Click to expand...

Yep, it'l give you a warning(usual windows stuff, the end of the world is near, do this at your own peril,ect), just enter y and go ahead. Unless he's dual booting, do a fix boot as well(just to be on the safe side).
 
With this problem I tend to do a combo of all the above and then do a full checkdsk /r.

FIXBOOT
FIXMBR
CHECKDSK /R

If that doesn't work...tends to be a reload.
 
Poolybit said:
If that doesn't work...tends to be a reload.
Click to expand...

That tends to be what most people would do, however there is a relatively easy (if a little long winded) process that you can go through to make the PC bootable again, and to use any previous restore points to get the machine back to a workable state.

Obviously no use if you don't use System Restore, but if you do have it switched on, it can save you the hassle of going through a full rebuild.
 
Thats some excellent help from you all, I'll get my friend to try it out. :)

Thanks very much all. :)
 
Check the boot order of the drives also, if you stick a USB flash disk / HDD in some computers, it will try and boot of that before a normal HDD.

Happens on the HP machines I use at work
 
I got him to go into the bios and cd rom was sellected as the boot drive. I got him to change to HDD1, but it still came up with the same message. There are no disks in the floppy/pen drives/cd etc.

So the next bit is xp recovery console. He dosent have the disk, so will wait until he borrows a copy.
 
Just a thought, before he uses the recovery console get him to run Memtest to check his Ram. Something must have happened to corrupt either the MBR or the install in the fist place. Not a lot of point in going through it all to find a corrupted windows at the end.
 
if all the info above dont fix it use this :D

get a empty floppy run exe and then boot from floppy drive and thats it.

then just edit boot.ini
 
Ah right thanks mate. I never noticed that lol, so its a fix? excellent thanks very much. :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom