NTLDR is missing. Press any key to restart.

My laptop was working fine yesterday and today when I turned it on I receive the message "NTLDR is missing Press any key to restart". I have 2 discs that came with this laptop: "Acer Recovery Disc 1" and " Acer Recovery Disc 2". By using this it seems I will lose all my data on both the c and d drive, which is far from ideal, since I have a lot of university work, as well as photos, etc. that I will never be able to recover. After googling I have not come up with anything very helpful, except that I should check my BIOS is up to date and that I should insert the xp bootable disc, which I don't have, nor do I think I ever had it! Any suggestions as to how I can overcome this would be very welcome.

if you are lucky, all that needs doing is to copy the missing NTLDR file into the root of the hard drive from another computer with the same version of windows. It probably been knocked out by a virus - or by overkeen antivirus software. Are you running Norton AV or IS by any chance?
To do that you either need something like a VistaPE boot disk, or else be able to mount the hard drive in another machine. If you dont have that available to you, time to call in help
If you are unlucky, the hard drive has been trashed and wiped. In which case you need professional help to try and get it back. It usually IS possible

just before you go down that route, just make sure when you boot you have removed any CD/floppy/USB disks from the machine - they can cause that error

I often find that this error can be cured by booting from a Windows XP installation disk and running chkdsk from the Recovery Console. Any Windows XP installation disk would do, if you could borrow one. However Acer may not have given you the option of doing this, depending on how their recovery disks work. I HATE recovery disks!

This error may well be an early warning that your hard drive is failing. Laptop hard drives fail very frequently.

I have seen a similar one recently. It was not just NTLDR that was missing, but also ntdetect.com and boot.ini. I was lucky, I mounted the disk on another PC, and just copied the missing files across and it worked. The XPP ones seem to be the same as XPH.

I'm not sure about ntdetect and ntdlr but the boot.ini file says which partition(s) Windows is installed on so you would need to edit it if Windows is not on the first partition on the hard drive.

boot.ini is different for each version of windows, though you can hack it to say whatever you want: its only a text file
NTLDR and ntdetect.com I believe are supposedly version specific, but I've had no problems using the "wrong" one in the past.

follow Alan's first post, when in the recovery console simply type:

CHKDSK C: /F
(Then press enter)

remember to have a space between CHKDSK and C: and /F. It should fix any logical problem your hard drive might have, if that doesn't fix it then follow Jon's first post.

Hi,

try this URL

http://www.completepcpedia.com/ntldr_missing.html

This should be helpful to you.

Hi,

try this URL

http://www.completepcpedia.com/ntldr_missing.html

This should be helpful to you.

Hi,

try this URL

http://www.completepcpedia.com/ntldr_missing.html

This should be helpful to you.

actually the instructions on that site are wrong
the commands
COPY D-Drive:\i386\NTLDR C\:
COPY D-Drive:\i386\NTDETECT.COM C:\

should read
COPY D:\i386\NTLDR C:\*.*
COPY D:\i386\NTDETECT.COM C:\*.*

however as Acer computers don't come with a windows CD, this method of repair isn't possible here
IF Acer had installed a copy of the I386 folder on the machine, then you may be able to do it by booting with a VistaPE disk and copying the files from the installed I386 folder. However the folder may not be there