ntdlr error - fixes i have used so far not working

Hello,

I am extremely embarrassed to admit the following and ridiculously angry with myself for doing something as totally stupid as I did, but it is done now..sigh..

I have the NTLDR is missing - press ctrl alt del to restart ?nightmare? error.

This is how it happened. I need(ed) to reformat my hard drive, but first I was going to back up everything. I back up every so often, though, now I know not near as often as I should!. (last back up was 5/21/07 sigh?.) Well, not thinking, instead of backing up, I put the restore cd in the drive and the screen came up saying: ?loading ramdisk? ? then I got to the next screen which basically was asking if I wanted to restore out of the box or not. I chose the first step in the wizard which said ?out of the box?. Then I clicked NEXT and realized ? I had not backed up my files!! So I cancelled out of the restore cd wizard.

When I restarted the computer, I got the aforementioned nightmare error.

I have been researching for many, many hours on how to fix it or at least be able to boot into windows. I?ve done the following:

1. created a floppy boot disk with ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini on it to restore ? I have all ? but I don?t know if the dates mean anything on the ones downloaded from another laptop

this did not work ? I still came up with the same error or some other errors ? one pointing to hal\something?.i am not sure if it is my boot.ini that is causing the problem or what. Oh, by the way, I went into the BIOS and made sure that the computer booted up to FDD first when trying the floppy option.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

I have created the boot.ini file without the ??./NoExecute=OptIn? part as well and it did not work.

Does anyone have any clue why my boot.ini is not working? Or could the problem be with my ntldr file somehow???

2. found bcupdate.exe or bcupdate2.exe on the web ? I have both

have not been able to get the #1 to work to even do this?

3. heard MS has several setup disks that I may be able to get (buy, whatever) that will get me my system ? today is Sunday, so I will have to try that avenue tomorrow unless someone here has the magical answer.

4. something I have done that I probably should not have done, is tried variations of boot disks as per some of the sites I have been in ? (that?s how I heard about the bcupdate.exe file). I hope this has not destroyed my hard drive.

This is what happens when I start or restart the computer. The Toshiba window comes up ? then I get a small blinking horizontal line in the upper left corner ? the rest of the screen is black ? it reminds me of a DOS prompt, but it is not as prominent as the prompt and it blinks a bit faster. It blinks like this for almost 2 minutes. When it stops, the screen goes black.

When I have pressed F8 to go into Safe Mode, the same thing happens but after a time, the Advanced Options window comes up with Start Mode as one of the choices.


I have winxp pro sp2 with a core 2 duo 2.0 ghz processor. it is a toshiba laptop p100-st9742 - just got it 2/15/07. i have a 4 year warranty on it.

I don?t think I have a scsi drive ? if that is the problem with the boot disk. I have been able to F8 and get the menu, but all choices lead me to the hal\whatever error or the original error.

I think I read that if I use a recovery console I will lose the data on my hard drive. I NEED the data on my hard drive just long enough to back some of it up and then reformat it.

If you KNOW FOR SURE that you can help me, please send detailed steps as if I was a baby on how to get into my system so I CAN back up these files and reformat.