NTLDR is missing
I foolishly installed Windows 7 RC on my PC with an existing XP OS. I created a seperate partition for W7 (on D:), with XP on C:. My system has one Western Digital SATA 400GB HDD. The PC is 2 months old and was running perfectly.
As W7 was not compatible with all my hardware (Hauppauge USB WinTV-CI), I decided to use only XP. However, I wished to get rid of the annoying W7 boot option, "Choose an earlier version of windows".
I read on a forum that this boot option could be removed by inserting the W7 RC DVD in the drive and going START, RUN, [DVD Drive], and typing a command (which I have since forgotten). When I rebooted the PC I got the message "NTLDR is missing". I tried using an ACRONIS recovery to restore the MBR. The recovery was successful but I still got "NTLDR is missing". I then did a recovery of the XP OS partition using ACRONIS. This recovery was successful, but I still got the NTLDR message.
I then used my Windows XP Pro disk to boot into recovery consol. I followed the instructions at http://kb.acronis.com/content/1759 , but I still get the annoying NTLDR message.
After using the commands below:
copy [drive]:\i386\ntldr [letter]:\
copy [drive]:\i386\ntdetect.com [letter]:\
I typed the commands
cd..
dir /p
But no files were found.
Does this mean that the 'copy [drive]:\i386\ntldr [letter]:\' , with [drive]=e:\ in my case, did not work?
I am at my witts end with this. I hope someone out there has a solution. I won't be playing with W7 anytime soon after this experience.

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Hi, you could try : Get back into the recovery consol and run the, fixboot [drive] command if operating system is on C: then type fixboot C:
Give that a shot good luck
Stephen
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Hello all,
Thank you for using [[http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/ | Acronis True Image]]
Timothy,
Please try to perform the operation again, it looks like the operation has failed. Please boot up from the Windows Bootable CD, then go to the Recovery Console (the first Repair option you come to).
From the command prompt please type:
FIXMBR C:
FIXBOOT C:
COPY CDDrive:\I386\NTLDR C:\
COPY CDDrive:\I386|NTDETECT.COM C:\
BOOTCFG /rebuild
After that, please reboot your computer.
If the problem persists, please perform a repair installation of your Windows. Windows Repair Installation will keep your applications and configuration untouched and will allow you to install the appropriate drivers in order to make Windows bootable.
The full description of this process is available at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315341
Please insert your disk with Windows installation files, launch it and select "Repair" option.
Also, have you tried to recover the archive using Acronis True Image 11 Home? Do you have Acronis Bootable rescue media?
Thank you.
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Dear Oleg Lee,
Thanks for the post, it worked and you saved my life.
Thanks
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NTLDR (abbreviation of NT Loader) is the boot loader for all releases of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system up to and including Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. NTLDR is typically run from the primary hard disk drive, but it can also run from portable storage devices such as a CD-ROM, USB flash drive, or floppy disk. NTLDR can also load a non NT-based operating system given the appropriate boot sector in a file.
NTLDR requires, at the minimum, the following two files to be on the system volume:
NTLDR, which contains the main Boot loader itself
boot.ini, which contains configuration options for a boot menu.
To load an NT-based OS, ntdetect.com must also be present. (Strictly speaking, only NTLDR is actually required. If boot.ini is missing, NTLDR will default to \Windows on the first partition of the first hard drive. Many desktops in the home are in this configuration and a missing boot.ini file will simply generate an error stating it is missing, ccnp then boot into Windows successfully.) In Vista, Boot information is stored in a Registry-like file called the Boot Configuration Data (BCD) store. Vista comes with a command-line tool bcdedit.com for configuring BCD.
The Volume Boot Record written to disk by the Windows NT format command attempts to load and to run the NTLDR program.
In Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and newer versions, NTLDR was replaced; the boot loader functionality is instead provided by two new components: winload.exe and the Windows Boot Manager.
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