My Comp Died
 

I recently installed a new burner on my home made somewaht ghetto rigged pc. Well it was all working fine until today. i was playing half life and it froze so i shut down the pc using the button thing and now when i try to get back on it says "ntldr not found" i know it has something to do with slave, master, secondays slave, all that crap but im an idiot and have no idea waht to do. so, before i spend $200+ getting it professionaly fixed does any one have ne ideas?

windows xp pro
geforce 3 ti 200
w/e else u need to know do not hesitate to ask.

well i guess for now im stuck on this 400Mhz piece in my basement....

That error message means that the OS isn't loaded correctly. The easiest fix would be to reinstall Windows. Or you might could even just use the Win XP cd to do a repair of the install.

That happens at my school when there is a disc in the floppy drive.

im currently trying to reformat. the options were quick reformat or regular. i did quick and it didnt work so now im trying to do regular. its been at 0% for 20 mins now. is it supposed to take this long? no theres no disk in the A:. i tryed a repair but it just brought me to a dos screen with some crap on it. well nothing is working :/

Every comp I touch goes slow its a conspiracy.

NTLDR is a file which is supposed to be present in the root directory of the system partition. (Most likely your C:)

The easiest thing you can do is boot the machine using a boot disk (make sure it is a Windows XP disk, nothing else), and then when you have your prompt, enter windows. If this lets you in to windows then the file is definitley corrupt. Do quick check for viruses, then copy the NTLDR file from the disk to the hard drive.

IF you don't have a disk you can try booting off of the WinXP CD, and then try copying NTLDR from the CD to your C:\

Well Sqrl that idea didnt work. im all out of ideas :(

Well, then all you can do is reinstall Windows. =)

Most likely what happened is that damned NTLDR got corrupted when you powered down.

To avoid this in the future, when you do reinstall windows, make yourself a set of rescue disks or whatever fancy thing they call it in Win XP. =)

Is the comp not starting up windows at all or is it just giving you that error?

WinXP can not start without a good copy of NTLDR and NTLDR is the file that launches the OS. It does this by loading it's own file system and reading the BOOT.INI file to see which OS's are available.

Hmm ok reformat it is. I deleted the partition then tryed doing the quick format. It didnt work and said that the drive may not be connected, etc so in other words it wasnt reading it. I tryed doing the normal format and it was at 0% for 2 hours so i figured it wasnt working and turned it off. so is my hard drive shot? should i just buy a new one?

Your ribbon cables may be busted, your motherboard's primary or secondary channels might be broken.. could be anything. Go borrow a friend's drive/cables and see what happens.

How big is your hard drive?

Also, after deleting the partition you made a new one right? (I assume you did, but just in case.)

After creating the new parition you must Reboot. If you don't then the machine doesn't acknowledge it properly.

After rebooting you have to do a normal format. You can never do a quick format on a new partition.

I took my old hard drive out of my other comp and put it in this 1. it got to this dos looking loading screen thing where it checks for viruses and then just froze there. should i try using the ribbons? is the normal format supposed to take 10 years?

Time of format depends on Hard Drive size, which is why I asked.

Also, the ribbons on your HD in your new computer are probably 80 pin cables whereas the ones from the old hard drive your talking about are probably 40 pin cables, so you don't want to try using them with the new hard drive.

Generally speaking if you can partition a drive, the ribbon should be ok. Usually if it's damaged the drive doesn't even show up.

I don't know how the setup for WinXP is, but when installing Win2k you can create and delete partitions at setup and have the setup utility format the drive using the file system of your choice without having to reboot.

Try setting your computer to boot from your CD drive and then put in your WinXP disc, reboot, and run the setup program. Do all your partitioning and stuff right in setup. If you still can't make any headway you are going to be better off taking the machine in to have a tech fix it for you.

my hard drive is 60 gb and the hd out here is 20. so are u sure i couldnt try switching pin cords?

Well, you can try, but if the one with the old hard drive is a 40 pin cable you'll want to go buy a new 80 pin cable. So trying with the old cable just to see if it works shouldn't hurt anything, the hard drive will just run in a slower mode. If the old cable works then go get a 80 pin cable appropriate for your HD speed.

yeah you're not alone man, i had about 63 gigs of movies and when i was downloading another movie it just went to a blue screen and said the hard drive isn't writeable!!! before you know it when i restarted the hard drive it doen't even load up and all that 63 gigs of stuff is gone....i think is was the freakin fan...if is stalls for some reason it has to be the fan

so i went to fry's electronics and bought 400 bucks worth of stuff; 200 dollar case that holds 7 fans and has a fan regulator atthe top and i also bought this d link so i can use my laptop (the one i am using right now) without network cable!! (sucker is even faster than the T! i have at work :-P
and i bout this 120 gig hard drive (maxtor not western digital. i'm not going to mess with that again man!!!) and bought some other nick nacks for my palm. O_o

I had a Western Digital HD go out on me once.... They did replace it though. After three weeks that is :( Those bastards!

Ok heres what happened. I took put the pin cords from this comp and put them in my comp. I started it. at the same part where it would usualy say ntldr not found it now said error loading OS. Hmmm interesting. so i load up my windows disk. delete the partition, restart, do a full reformat. nothin. it stays at 0% for hmm going on 45 mins now. so i took the pin cords from my comp and put them in this one. this comp works fine. plz explain this phenomonom. waht do i do sqrl!!!!!