NTLDR missing
i use always the latest acronis with latest builts
at the moment acronis home 2011 (built 6957)
i have images of a crashed computer
images of Drive-C of a windows XP Pro computer who is not able to start windows
anymore
i recovered this Drive-C with the latest image and get at startup the NTLDR missing message
when i tried to recover this C-Drive with older images i always get same error at start up
this happened with other computers who crashed in the recent past as well
i really cant see the problem
fact is that the images were created with acronis 10 and recoveres by acronis 2011
but this shouldnt be a problem...??
or do i really have to create the images "sector by sector" in the future...
thanks for any hint
regards
ray, switzerland


- Log in to post comments

First you might want to check what drive is designated in the BIOS from which to boot. correct this setting if it doesn't ppoint to the right (hard)drive.
Also, when you restored, did you make sure you were restoring to the correct harddisk? The drive letter assignments won't necesarily be the same when you use the boot CD as the assignments inside Windows.
- Log in to post comments

Also make sure the booting partition is set Active (this is usually the Windows partition).
- Log in to post comments

'ntldr is missing' is windows message, so MBR found the (active) windows partition and loaded its boot sector code. And only then it searched for ntldr and failed.
- Log in to post comments

Not exactly correct - the message "NTLDR is missing" is contained in the first sector of every partition that was formatted by Windows XP. So if you boot to the wrong partition you will see that message. That most likely happens if the wrong partition is set as "Active".
Here's an illustration from Disk 2, which contains two NTFS data partitions, neither of which is Active:
Here's the first sector of the second partition in a hex editor (Temp Files (E:)):
If one sets either of these partitions "Active" and then boots to it, you'll see the error message "NTLDR is missing".
Attachment | Size |
---|---|
56731-93946.png | 68.74 KB |
56731-93949.png | 18.03 KB |
- Log in to post comments

Mark is right onthe money and it explains why I've had cases where restarting the BIOS to the correct drive is all that was necessary to make a machine bootable after a restore when ntldr missing messsage came up.
- Log in to post comments

Hello all,
Thank you for posting and your help.
Just in case, we have a Knowledge Base article that shows how to fix issues related to NTLDR is missing -
- Windows Fails to Boot With "NTLDR is missing"
If you need additional help, please let me know.
Thank you.
- Log in to post comments