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Hey,
I turned my pc off the other night closed as normal but now I am getting the NTLDR missing error message, I do not have the Windows dics as it is a 6 year old pc. The computer is a Pachard Bell but I have upgraded the system and I dont think it has any of their parts left, I have norton running on the system, any ideas how to fix this? I have looked at a lot of help pages but all of them talk about the windows cd, is it a major problem if I do not have this?
Any help would be great.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
On the screen for picking which windows to load I can see:
Please sekect the operating system to start:
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
1
Use the up and down arrow keys to move the highlight to your choice.
Press ENTER to change
Seconds Until highlighted choice will be started automatically: 15
At the bottom of the screen there is this extra text
For Troubleshooting and advanced startup options for Windows, Press F8.
I think the 1 is a mistake I made with one of the previous help files
the next screen is a new one, this screen asks me to pic the operating system I wish to run
Please indicate EVERYTHING you see on this screen! Verbatim. :-)
Reboot the computer. This time using the up and down arrow keys navigate to the second Windows Xp option and press Enter.
Edit: It appears from your post that Daavee was correct that we should have renamed the original boot.ini file. Never had to do that before but, my bad.. :)
Hey guys,
Ok here we go, what happens when I turn on the pc a boot from HDD.
After pressing the power button I see the RAM and sata driver checking screen, then next screen is just running other checks, the next screen is a new one, this screen asks me to pic the operating system I wish to run, at this point I select Windows XP home edition, after this I get to the final screen, at this point I get error message
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt
\minint\system32\config\system
You can attempt to repair this file by starting Windows Setup using the original Setup CD-ROM.
Select 'r' at the first screen to start repair
Any help would be great
First, Windows Xp does not need a boot.ini file to load.
My understanding is when there is a single partition on the hard drive, XP can boot without the boot.ini file (in fact, Jose is very fond of pointing out this interesting tidbit!). However, I'm not sure that's always the case (that is, when there are multiple partitions).
I do like Jose's idea of renaming the old boot.ini file. This way when you one runs bootcfg /rebuild, the new boot.ini is pristine and perfect. What OP has is convoluted since there is a reference to minint, which is usually indicative of a recovery partition, true. And he is apparently choosing that option and then getting a BSOD.
I agree OP needs to explain more, too!
Assuming he performed all the Recovery Console commands correctly, including chkdsk /r and bootcfg /rebuild (and I'm not 100% sure he has), I definitely agree with you that malware is a likely explanation.
