Sad day for computer NTLDR missing

B

baldwintpenguin

New Member
Ok my computer just froze up one day, wasnt acting buggy or anything just froze. restarted and said NTLDR is missing, well i had to reformat awhile back and somehow my recovery partition was formated along with it. I ordered compaqs recovery cds for my specific computer and when i tried their recovery it failed everytime. It would let me get through the 7 cds and ask for the first one again so when i put it in it would pop up a blue screen with white text, asking me to check my bios for cacheing or shadowing and to turn them off if i could along with any firewalls ect ect, well i did everything its asked yet it still freezes, so i tried reformatting with the disks to reinstall windows (which it says i should be able to do). The same problem occurs here, only it doesnt let me get through all seven disks everytime. When the 1st disk is not in it says NTLDR is missing, i know this has to do with lack of operating system, but it wont let me install xp homeedtion (thats what was originally on the computer and what the recovery disks are for). For bios i have cd-r setup to be read first and hard disk to be read last. I still get the blue screen with white text its gives me instructions then at the bottom always says somthing along the lines of 0x00002345 (0C00234x00,repeat with differ numbers 2 more times) these are not actual numbers just an example of the numbers that shows up. My computer is a Compaq Presario, 2400 Athlon, 384 Ram, 40 gig harddrive, not sure what else you might need to know about it. Sorry this is so long but any help would be great thanks.
 
DL this program to another pc. Do you have a floppy drive on the bad pc ?
if you have the a floppy get the bootable floppy creator
if not DL the cd image file and burn to a cd
you know how to set your bios boot option ?
http://www.memtest86.com/

you may also want to connect up your HD to another xp pc, usually unplugging the gray cable and a power connection from the secondary ide controller ( no other devices also ) you will not have to set any jumpers.
go to control panel, admin tools / computer management / disk management, reformat the hd,,,, make sure you get the right one, then do a scan disk....also when windows finds your hd for the first time and it wants to fix it, let xp do that.
 
I cannot even get into windows or start up or get into dos or anything. will it take that if i burn it to a cd? and do i just burn all the files after i download the memtest86 3.2 release to a cd? then put it in cdrom when i start up computer. sorry i'm not computer pro but know a little here and there. I do know how to setup my bios so things will start in different order. I do have a floppy drive yes but what good will changing the cds to floppy do?
-Thanks
 
there are two flavors of memtest86

1. a bootable floppy creator when you run the DL'd program it creates the floppy

2. an iso file. you DL the iso ( image file ) and burn to a cd. You have to use the image burning function of your cd burning sftwr, not just burn the file to a cd.

more than likely if your pc is not even posting, you will not be able to even get into the bios.

make sure no power is being applied. pop out your ram, do not put it back in yet, plug in the power, turn on the pc, the pc should complain by beeping. if it does not , that is bad,. Unplug power and reseat the video card, plug back in, try again. unplug, put the ram back in, plug back in and try again... well what were the results ?
 
I'm having a similar problem with my PC (it's okay MODS, I'm not hijacking the thread ;)), so I tried burning a Live CD for Linux...haven't tried it yet but hopefully it will give me a change to explore my HDD without Windows crashing.
 
ok so i put it onto a floppy, and put it into my broken computer, i let it for a bit, then had to leave for school, i figured it would be ok until i got back, i returned, and when i finally got a chance to go look at it, it was still running, this was almost 4 hours later. Theres a long list of errors it found, so does memtest86 fix anything or is it just telling me whats wrong? I ran the program it went through all tests and i'm assuming started itself over, what am i suppose to do after i run memtest86? didnt see anything on the website
-thanks
 
Viking said:
there are two flavors of memtest86

1. a bootable floppy creator when you run the DL'd program it creates the floppy

make sure no power is being applied. pop out your ram, do not put it back in yet, plug in the power, turn on the pc, the pc should complain by beeping. if it does not , that is bad,. Unplug power and reseat the video card, plug back in, try again. unplug, put the ram back in, plug back in and try again... well what were the results ?
Click to expand...

did all of this minus the messing with video card, did absolutely everything else. I'm typing all of this from my now *nonbroken* computer :D lol thanks tons guys i ran the program twice and the second time i ran memtest i noticed there was no problems it was seeing, so i tried reinstall windows again and it worked! lol thanks lots!
 
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