Summary: A fix for the Windows XP Boot error 'NTLDR missing'
Date: Around 2009
Refactor: 16 January 2025: Checked links and formatting.

Sometimes it happens, when you bootup Windows all you see is a black screen saying “NTLDR missing”. There are a lot of things that can cause this, but what I had last week was a new one for me, a virus had done this to one of my users. Note that in case you've had a virus on a system, even if you fixed it, you should consider reinstalling the system. Once a virus was active on a computer it should never be trusted again.

Besides of telling the user what had caused this we also had to do something about the technical problem of course. This is one of many solutions to this problem, for me it did work on a Windows XP SP2 laptop.

1. Boot the laptop using a Windows XP (preferably SP2) CD
2. Enter the recovery console by pressing R
3. Select the Windows Installation you're trying to recover by pressing the preceding number
4. Go to the CD by entering 'D:' on the commandline
5. Go to the i386 directory by entering 'cd i386' on the commandline
6. Copy the files NTLDR and ntdetect.com by using the command 'copy NTLDR c:' and 'copy ntdetect.com c:'
7. Now issue the command 'bootcfg /rebuild' which will rebuild the boot.ini file for you. This could take a while.
   1. When asked, enter load options if you need any. You can always leave these empty to set them when Windows is working again.
8. Enter exit and remove the CD