Hello Everyone, I was running Windows 2000 and recently tried to add a new 40 GB HD (replacing my old 4 GB). Also I added a 128 MB memory along with existing 64 MB. I replaced my old harddisk and installed new one. I could partition the disk and when trying to install Windows XP on it, I found that I had to install smartdrive first. So, I killed to process. I restarted computer but it is not showing me the the login prompt as before. I saw for quite sometime an warning "NTLDR is missing". I also could see the login prompt for a while and slowly went dark. Now if I power on the computer, I can see that the computer is trying to access disk drive and CD-ROM drive but stop. The screen remains black. I tried to put bootdisk and bootcdrom but that does not work. I have a Acer travelmate 513 laptop. I would very much appreciate if someone can help me in this matter. Thanks very much. Babul

NTLDR is a critical boot file that bootstraps the system - it starts the loading of the operating system. You mentioned that a message said NTLDR was missing. The result is that the operating system can't boot. You'll have to reinstall XP again. Have the CD ROM drive be the first boot device in the BIOS setup. Then the Windows XP CD will boot first and you can start to install XP again. When you did the first XP installation, did you stop it before it was done? Never stop in the middle of an OS install. Not sure if you did sorry if this wasn't the case. Mark

Reformat before you reinstall XP. Try a bootfloppy and xfdisk (<-- google) if you're having trouble killing the partition. Don't forget to set your boot sequence to whatever you're trying to boot from. ;)