Oh no! No NTLDR!

Upon startup, a system shows the error “NTLDR is missing.” You’ve checked for a disk in the floppy drive, but it’s empty. What’s your next step?

A) Boot to the recovery console and confirm that the NTLDR file is really missing.

B) The operating system is corrupted. Reload the operating system to correct the problem.

C) The BIOS may be out of date. Perform a BIOS upgrade to ensure the latest version is installed.

D) The hard drive cables may have come loose. Open the case of the computer and check the cables.




Answer: A) Boot to the recovery console and confirm that the NTLDR file is really missing.

The NTLDR file is one of the first files accessed by the boot process, and it’s usually located on the root directory of the boot drive. If it’s missing, the Windows operating system won’t boot and the only way to find out what’s happened is to boot to the recovery console and start investigating.

The incorrect answers:

B) The operating system is corrupted. Reload the operating system to correct the problem.

Although we don’t know the extent of the problems that we’ve gotten ourselves into, it’s a bit early to throw in the towel and reload the entire operating system.

C) The BIOS may be out of date. Perform a BIOS upgrade to ensure the latest version is installed.

The BIOS of the system has very little to do with the recognition of the NTLDR file. Keeping your BIOS up-to-date is always a good idea, but it won’t help us solve this problem.

D) The hard drive connection may have come loose. Open the system and check the cables.
For the NTLDR file to be referenced, the boot partition of the hard drive must have tried to load the file during the boot process. If the hard drive wasn’t available, we wouldn’t have gotten as far as looking for the NTLDR file.