Yesterday my friend decided he wanted windows xp on his computer, he bought it and installed it but forgot to get rid of 2000. When he booted it asked him to choose an os. He messed around with boot.ini so it booted straight into xp then decided to delete all windows 2000 files. Now when the computer is turned on it just says ntldr is missing, press any key to restart. I have tried booting linux disks and various other obvious things, but it wont seem to work with anything. I found this - http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm but I don't know which solution I should be trying. I don't have the windows xp disks and was hoping I could just get a bootable file recovery program, I found a few but none will boot. The computer has a cd drive which will boot suse linux set up disks but nothing else, no floppy disk. I figured since he has deleted all windows 2000 operating files the windows 2000 way would not work. So.. What should I do? Tried - ERD commander, won't boot - various linux bootable cd's, don't boot. - pe builder, again won't boot.

"he wanted windows xp on his computer, he bought it and installed it " ??? " I don't have the windows xp disks"??? If he purchased the Xp cd , why not format the drive and reinstall the OS since he only wants XP " You're only as safe as your last update "

He didn't give me the disks and he isn't around. That would obviously be the easy option, I was hoping there would be another way to do this.

HI:I think the Following Site has the answer for ya Let us Know if it help you out Bon Courage.... http://tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm

That seemed great, booted fine on the first setting, I followed the instructions. However on restart I discovered the error messgae has changed to "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <Windows root>\system32\hal.dll. PLease re-install a copy of the above file." and the cd no longer works. Do you know of any bootable cds for this error. Thanks for your help.

Those disks are brilliant, got it working but ended up having to reinstall windows anyway. Thanks.