I recently bought a second-hand laptop. The laptop and OS (win xp pro) worked perfectly, but there was a load of crap on the hard drive, so I bought a usb floppy drive so that I could format the hard drive and re-install the OS. Now that I have formatted the hard drive the laptop will simply not boot with anything that I have; everytime it's turned on the message "NTLDR is missing" is displayed. I have tried to boot with loads of disks: win me startup floppy, win xp startup floppy, several dos floppies including version 7.1 which I downloaded, win me cd, win xp cd, the drivers cd that came with the laptop and I have tried copying ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini to a floppy and it doesn't like that either. All I get is the same message. I can't even get a prompt with any of the DOS disks. The hard drive has been formatted as NTFS, like it already was. The laptop's reasonably up-to-date: Pentium IV 1.8GHz, 256MB RAM, 30gig hard drive, and was working without fault before the format. I have tested the floppy drive on my desktop PC and it reads/writes fine. I have used most of the boot disks before and never had any trouble with them. The laptop does support a USB floppy in the firmware and, out of frustration, I have tried every possible combination of BIOS settings without success. Please, please please can somebody help me with this. I am literally puuling my hair out with this one. Sam.

Ok, have you gone into the BIOS and set the CD as a bootable device that comes before the hard drive, stuck the XP CD in, booted off it, deleted the partition that's on there, and proceeded to install XP. If so, what happens when you do that? MCSE, MCSA Messaging, baby!

For boot disks, a usb floppy device wont do crap. If the me or the xp disks are burnt, then they may not have the currect ntldrs either. Or maybe as the other guy said above, go into the bios and have it boot the cdrom before the hard disk.

try this easy fix http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm