I Need Help. Reinstalling Windows XP

imsi

I've formatted both primary and slave hard drives before giving away a desktop. Thought I'd reboot with an XP SP2 OS disc just to make sure the new owner could install his own OS.
I am getting the error message "NTDLR is missing. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del To Restart"
I've made sure all connections are tight and have changed boot order to CD Rom first but keep getting the error message.
I disconnected both hard drives and got through to the Welcome page of Windows setup page but, of course, it told me I had no hard drives connected.
Reconnected the hard drives and same error.

Any advice welcome

Rob

fwor

Have another check through the BIOS settings.

Some have a very confusing way of selecting the boot order, and you may find that it seems to appear in two places.

If you still can't get it to boot from CD it may help to use a partition editor (e.g. GPARTED) to edit the partition flags on the HDDs so that none of them show as "bootable".

imsi

Just checking. I'll need to install gparted on another PC and connect the hard drives to it, to be able to do this, right?

esuhl

imsi wrote: »

Just checking. I'll need to install gparted on another PC and connect the hard drives to it, to be able to do this, right?

No -- you can download a bootable image of GParted here: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

And then boot that on the affected PC.

fwor

esuhl wrote: »

And then boot that on the affected PC.

Except that they are just going to get the "NTLDR missing" error if they do that!

If they are SATA drives, I personally would risk leaving their power connections in but unplugging their data connections, and connecting them up after GPARTED had booted. If you choose to do that, take anti-static precautions.

Knarf44

An argubly easier fix than that being suggested especially for those of a non-techie nature is to simply download the latest version of Hiren's Boot CD http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/ download link is about half way down the page. Once you've downloaded the zip file extract the contents and burn the iso image to a blank CD-R. Then, boot your computer using your new Hiren's disk and one of the menu items is "Fix NTDLR is missing".

imsi

fwor wrote: »

Have another check through the BIOS settings.

Some have a very confusing way of selecting the boot order, and you may find that it seems to appear in two places.

Well I don't have much experience in BIOS settings but figured I didn't have much to lose.
Advanced/IDE Configuration/ then selecting [Not Detected] for the HDDs has at least allowed me to get the installation setup running and disks/and partitions recognised.
Is this likely to give problems further down the line?

Knarf44 wrote: »

An argubly easier fix than that being suggested especially for those of a non-techie nature is to simply download the latest version of Hiren's Boot CD http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/ download link is about half way down the page. Once you've downloaded the zip file extract the contents and burn the iso image to a blank CD-R. Then, boot your computer using your new Hiren's disk and one of the menu items is "Fix NTDLR is missing".

I'll do this. Even if I don't use it for this problem, it looks a handy thing to have. Thanks

prowla

Is the BIOS set to boot from HD before CD?

imsi

I've tried installing XP without success.
It shows Partition1 as having 516 MB that are not free, is that normal?
Continuing on, I get message:
You chose to install XP on a partition that contains another operating system. Installing XP on this might cause the other OS to function improperly. etc

What do you guys recommend?

fwor

imsi wrote: »

What do you guys recommend?

It depends whether there is anything on the two hard disks that you want to keep. I assume not if you're giving it away...

If there's nothing you want to keep, I'd delete all the existing partitions, and create one partition on the smaller drive (assuming it's not tiny) for Windows to install on, and one partition on the bigger drive for all user data.

imsi

fwor wrote: »

It depends whether there is anything on the two hard disks that you want to keep. I assume not if you're giving it away...

If there's nothing you want to keep, I'd delete all the existing partitions, and create one partition on the smaller drive (assuming it's not tiny) for Windows to install on, and one partition on the bigger drive for all user data.

Nothing to keep no.
In fact I formatted the drives when the PC was working.
I'm just working with one drive connected now for simplicity.
This drive has been formatted 3 times during the XP attempted installs.
I've deleted the old partition and created another with the default options on installing XP but I still get the message saying there is another OS present.