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NTLDR not found

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I made a full backup of my system disk to a USB hard drive with Acronis TIH 11, and I made a rescue disk on a Sanddisk flash drive. I booted from the flash drive and wiped my hard drive clean with the Acronis Cleaning tool. Then I tried to boot from my rescue device again and it didn't work. I received the message "NTLDR not found."

I tried alot of things. I tested the flash drive in another notebook, and it booted. I reset the BIOS defaults and it didn't automatically find the hard drive until I manualy reset it. I removed memory and the internal hard drive from the notebook, and put them back. I tried numerous flash drives until finally it booted. It booted from a flash drive that had Macrium Reflect on it and it installled Windows 7.

Can someone explain what happened? Did Disk Wipe do something that caused NTLDR not to be found? What triggered NTLDR to be suddenly found again? What the hell is NTLDR?

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The bootable Recovery Media, or Rescue Media, is Linux-based and doesn't support some hardware configurations. You may see such an error when it doesn't support or recognize your hardware. Just to rule out any third-party USB 3.0 card issues, try inserting that flash drive in a USB 2.0 port, directly on the back of your PC, and boot again.

If the Recovery Media cannot support your hardware, you can use the Plus Pack with Acronis True Image to create a WinPE-based bootable Recovery Media, into which you may inject required Windows drivers.

But, you really should not have wiped your system drive without first checking if the Recovery Media could restore files to your system.

KCav,

NTDLR not found would happen when the BIOS find the disk to boot on but doesn't find the boot loader that kicks off Windows. I suspect that in your case there was a BIOS setting or detection issue.