Member Avatar for chandlaj

housemate woke up this morning.
large pop-up window that he didn't want to read.
all he picked up were, 'restart computer' and something about disk space being deleted.
why he didn't read on is beyond me.
but here's the dilemma.
when one reboots the machine, no hard drives are detected, and following the system specs box appearance, i am told ntldr is missing, and to press ctrl+alt+del to restart.
so i try grab the nearest system disk, and attempt to boot up the machine with its help.
instead, once the system specs box appears, nothing happens.
no command prompt, nothing.
when i type stuff in, (ie. sys c: - which i read was the command to copy the system files over) the floppy drive clunks along with nothing to show for its efforts in the end.
a continually inaccessible machine.
i think the machine is fubar.
at least by my limited knowledge base.
any ideas?
help...

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Dani AI

Generated

Short checklist and next steps based on what reported and ’s suggestion.

First, triage hardware vs software. If the BIOS does not list the hard disk at all, treat it as a hardware problem first: power connector, data cable or the drive itself can fail. Power down, reseat or swap the power/data cable and try a different motherboard port or another PC. If the drive still isn’t seen, do not keep powering it unnecessarily — that can make a failing drive worse. If the disk is detected by BIOS, the problem is likely boot‑loader or filesystem corruption rather than a dead disk.

If BIOS sees the disk but Windows won’t start and normal recovery media won’t get a prompt on this machine, use alternate rescue methods to recover data and diagnose. Boot a Linux live CD/USB or a WinPE/BartPE disk on that machine (or attach the suspect drive to a working PC as a secondary drive) and copy any important files off first. From those environments you can examine the partition table, run filesystem checks, and decide whether to attempt boot repairs or a reinstall.

When ready to repair Windows, do so from a known-good recovery environment and back up data first. Typical recovery steps address the master boot record, boot sector and missing boot files; if a floppy/CD you tried doesn’t behave, verify that media on another PC or burn a fresh recovery disc. If malware is suspected (the odd pop-up before the crash), clean the files from a clean system image or perform a fresh install after data rescue. If the disk is physically noisy or continues to disappear from BIOS, consider professional data-recovery services rather than repeated DIY writes.

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Member Avatar for caperjack

try this ,
Boot to the repair console with your XP CD in the drive...

1. Copy X:\i386\NTLDR C: (X is your CD ROM drive)
2. Copy X:\i386\NTDETECT.COM C:

Member Avatar for chandlaj

only problem is...
i can't get to a command prompt to do anything.
even with a system disk.
yikes.

Member Avatar for caperjack

if you have a winxp disk put it in and boot to it(you may need to change the boot sequence in the bios to get the cd to boot up) and hit R for repair and type it in there .

Member Avatar for chandlaj

excellent....
i'll give 'er a shot....

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