emachines ntldr is missing

2216ITGuy · Post by **2216ITGuy** » March 23rd, 2005, 8:54 pm

Hi all, This is my first time on this forum. I was wondering if anyone could help me out with the problem i am having. I have an emachine and recently my hard drive died. i went out and bought a brand new hard drive to put in my machine. i have an original copy of XP not a restore disc. i have installed the drive into my computer, have gone into the bios and set the computer to start up from the cdrom drive so i can install xp on the new drive. Maybe i have forgotten something along the way but now when i start the computer it tells me: "searching for boot record from cdrom . . . .not found" "searching for boot record from IDE-O. .ok" "NTLDR is missing" "press ctrl+alt+del to restart" anyone have an idea as to waht i may have done wrong, it would be of great help.

richh0323 · Post by **richh0323** » March 24th, 2005, 3:29 am

Your XP CD should be able to boot from the CD rom if set up in your BIOS as the first boot device. If you haven't done so check the POST and make sure that your hard drive, and CD ROM are recognized. If you have access to another computer, try your XP CD in that one and make sure it boots up from that CD Rom on the second computer. This will check to make sure that the CD works. Hope this helps.

2216ITGuy · Post by **2216ITGuy** » March 25th, 2005, 8:32 pm

ok here is what i have so far. i have gotten past the ntldr missing screen. now i get a disk i/o error when i start up w/o a boot disk. With a boot disk it gets me to the a: prompt but i can do nothing. hard drive is still new and it recognizes that but for some reason or another it will not recognize the cdrom drive. any ideas? this just keeps getting better.

richh0323 · Post by **richh0323** » March 26th, 2005, 5:44 am

If you are not recognizing the cdrom drive, I would check your cable to the CD Rom drive, make sure the connections are good on the motherboard, and CD Rom, check power cable connector to. When you first boot up you should see in the POST screen, your hard drive and the CD Rom. If you can see all this in the POST recheck you BIOS boot order, for installing a new hard drive it should be "A" drive, then "CD", then "C" Another easy thing you can do is with a 3.5" formatted floppy, make a boot disk you should be able to type in the DOS prompts of, a: c: and d: you should switch drives and they should be valid. Make sure you partition and format you hard drive too, before trying to install you OS.

2216ITGuy · Post by **2216ITGuy** » March 29th, 2005, 3:30 pm

i want to thank you for all your help on this. its stupid but i found what my problem was. when i went and checked the cable to the cdrom i noticed the jumper setting was set to slave, i set it to master and everything is up and running as it should. thank you again next time i will check the simple things first before i assume its a bigger problem.