i am the idiot.. long story, couldnt install xp on Amd500, Iwill xa100Mb, Voodoo banshee 16, with 2.1 gb hdd with Winme and 30 gb HDD for xp as dual boot . fdc, fastfat and other errors. intstalled 30gb into dell 300gl with win98 as second drive and installed xp there as fat32. (thought I could then swap back into other machine and all would be well once I had copied across the ntldr ntdetect and boot files. at worst would look for 3rd party boot manager) . remove drive from dell300 and reboot to 98 using ntldr. decide to get rid of ntldr by renaming it to ntldr1. reboot to "ntldr is missing' message. reboot to dos prompt but unable to see ntldr1 to rename it. deserve whipping but need help. how to restore ntldr initially and then how to remove afterwards so system will boot to win98 like good old days? have reinstalled 98 in hope would fix but of course it doesnt change these files. cannot reformat this hdd and start again as pc used by wife who isnt impressed by loss of data by too clever husband. In meantime have formatted and reinstalled win 98 on Amd500 box which ran like a dog and took 6 hours to install, i have a lot of patience but not much else.

"NTLDR Is Missing" Error Message When You Upgrade or Install Windows XP Over Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows Millennium Edition http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q314057

Try using NTFS for DOS !

boot to dos, at c prompt type "attrib -s -h -r ntldr1.*" without quotes rename file then type "attrib +h +s +r ntl*.*" without quotes