Hi - I hope you will bear with me whilst I try to get head around this....
I'm running Vista Home premium on a DELL inspiron 530 with my main HDD allocated to C: and a similar backup HDD allocated to E:.
Without warning today, Vista crashed, the screen went black and the message 'NTLDR is missing. Press CTRL + ALT + DEL to restart was displayed.
I tried several times to re-boot without success (including after checking hard drive data cables) and got the same error message; eventually (and purely by accident) I got back in by pressing F12, selecting Utility Partition and Vista somehow started normally.
The forums and notes on this site indicate that this message can occur on a dual-boot setup (Windows/XP) with the message relating to the XP side.
What's confusing me however is that this PC has had Vista from new and I have never attempted to set up dual-boot functionality with XP.
The Easy BCD program "View Settings" tells me that:
There is one entry in the Vista Bootloader.
Bootloader Timeout: 30 seconds.
Default OS: Microsoft Windows Vista
Entry #1
Name: Microsoft Windows Vista
BCD ID: {current}
Drive: C:\
Bootloader Path: \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Windows Directory: \Windows
I would be most grateful if someone could steo me through the process of resolving this error in not-too technical language as I really don't know what I should be doing.....
Many thanks for your time.
I'm running Vista Home premium on a DELL inspiron 530 with my main HDD allocated to C: and a similar backup HDD allocated to E:.
Without warning today, Vista crashed, the screen went black and the message 'NTLDR is missing. Press CTRL + ALT + DEL to restart was displayed.
I tried several times to re-boot without success (including after checking hard drive data cables) and got the same error message; eventually (and purely by accident) I got back in by pressing F12, selecting Utility Partition and Vista somehow started normally.
The forums and notes on this site indicate that this message can occur on a dual-boot setup (Windows/XP) with the message relating to the XP side.
What's confusing me however is that this PC has had Vista from new and I have never attempted to set up dual-boot functionality with XP.
The Easy BCD program "View Settings" tells me that:
There is one entry in the Vista Bootloader.
Bootloader Timeout: 30 seconds.
Default OS: Microsoft Windows Vista
Entry #1
Name: Microsoft Windows Vista
BCD ID: {current}
Drive: C:\
Bootloader Path: \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Windows Directory: \Windows
I would be most grateful if someone could steo me through the process of resolving this error in not-too technical language as I really don't know what I should be doing.....
Many thanks for your time.