I recently obtained an older sony vaio laptop with no hard drive. I installed a new drive and I have the oem recovery disk set, however I have been unable to get it to boot from the usb dvd-cdr drive (no optical drive on this unit)and I go into the "missing NTLDR" loop when I try to start it up. Does anybody have any ideas on how to get this baby running? Can I pull the drive and put it in an external enclosure and "pre load the needed files, then put it back in the sony? Help!
Put the oem disk in the dvd drive & then try booting from the dvd drive first rather than the hard drive which might be set first to boot. :)
- Check if the power supply cable that connects to the hard drive if it is loose.
- Check the BIOS. Confirm if your hard drive is listed in it.
- Also check the boot order as told earlier by EINSTEIN_007.
The normal way of correcting this error is as follows:
- Insert the Windows Vista bootable CD into the computer.
- When prompted to press any key to boot from the CD, press any key.
- Once in the Windows Vista setup menu press the "R" key to repair Windows.
- Log into your Windows installation by pressing the "1" key and pressing enter.
- You will then be prompted for your administrator password, enter that password.
- The 2 files listed below should be copied to the root directory of primary hard disk.
- copy F:\i386\ntldr c:\
- copy F:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\
{There is a space after 'copy' and before 'c:\'}
(In the above example, we are copying these files from the CD-ROM drive letter "F". This letter may differ depending on your PC's CD-ROM drive letter.)
- Once both of these files have been successfully copied, remove the CD from the computer and reboot.
Windows may not start and you may receive an "NTLDR is missing" error message if Windows is not up-to-date and there are too many files in the root folder.
Check out the solution for this at Microsoft Support Centre.