NTLDR is missing (somewhat complex)

[Xyllia]

I have four computers in my house, but only two are relevant to the discussion:


I have the Bedroom Computer (Which I will call "B") and a gaming room computer (which I will call "A").


I bought an SSD drive for Computer A and it had a 5+ year old install of Windows7 on it, so I wanted to reinstall Windows 7. The problem is, computer A does not have an optical disc drive, so I juggled potential solutions. Also, Computer A is in somewhat of a tight spot and it is hard to work on the computer, without ripping all the wires off, and removing it from its spot entirely, so I wasn't really wanting to go swapping optical drives or anything like that.


What I wound up doing is I wound up sharing Computer B's DVD drive across the LAN, and I ran Windows Setup from the old Win7 installation on Computer A and told it to install to the new SSD and then once installation was done, I went into BIOS and made the computer boot from the SSD to finish the installation.


All of that went smoothly, EXCEPT for some reason, Windows Setup put some sort of Boot Manager on both HDDs, and every time I boot the computer, I get a "Select what OS you want to boot" and it lists both HDD's Win7 installations.


Slightly annoying, but I can live with pressing the enter key upon turning the computer on.


Well, that was until I had a power outage a couple days ago. Now, when I boot the computer up, I get the dreaded "NTLDR is missing" error (even though that computer never had WindowsXP or earlier on it at all).


I was able to boot from the old HDD and I got the Boot Loader again (which allowed me to boot the new Win7 installation), but I want to get rid of that entirely.


I did some googling, and everybody says the same thing: Boot from Windows Install DVD.


.....but I can't do that, because the computer doesn't have a DVD drive. And apparently you can't run the CD from within Windows to get to Startup Repair while already running Windows.


How does one fix this without booting from a DVD?

 

[Paul Black]

Hi Xyllia,

If I understand you correctly, your best bet would be to use a burnt Win 7 USB as the installation media. That way there is no need to share the ODD across the network!

When you installed the OS, did you delete all the partitions leaving a single partition of un-allocted space in which to install Win 7 on?

I hope this helps!

 

[SIW2]

How does one fix this without booting from a DVD?

Use bootice
View attachment BootIce.zip

 

[Xyllia]

Hi Xyllia,

If I understand you correctly, your best bet would be to use a burnt Win 7 USB as the installation media. That way there is no need to share the ODD across the network!

When you installed the OS, did you delete all the partitions leaving a single partition of un-allocted space in which to install Win 7 on?

I hope this helps!

The computer I did the install on has an HDD and an SSD (the new disk).


I used Acronis to set up an MBR on the SSD, making one NTFS partition for the entire disk.


Then, while running Windows7 from the HDD, I ran Windows7 setup from the ODD across the LAN and installed Windows7 onto the SSD.


Once this was done, I went into the BIOS and told the BIOS to set the SSD as Boot Device #1 and the HDD as boot device #2 for a backup in case something went wrong, I'd still have my old Windows7 installation.


EDIT: @SIW2: I'll take a look at that, thanks!
EDIT2: Hmm. This (bootice) looks somewhat complicated... I might need to just wait until next time I'm at walmart, I'll likely buy a cheap USB drive and put a Win7 setup on it to fix the problem. Don't want to screw the whole thing up, lol.

 

[SIW2]

Restart the machine and immediately start tapping F8 and you should boot into startup repair.