Peenie Wallie

NTLDR is missing
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

That's what my computer says this morning, and this is a bad thing. I try rebooting about ten times, but that doesn't seem to help, so I'm thinking great and I start reluctanly digging through boxes of software looking for my XP Installation CD's.

I'm digging through all these boxes of obsolete technology like a homeless guy at the dump. I'm an incorrigible packrat, utterly incapable of throwing anything away. After digging through several crates of broken mice, Atari joysticks, soldering tools, and unlabeled CD's, I pray for the strenth to move forward. I imagine myself rising boldly from this quagmire - from this den of illegitimate technology and incinerating it in a great bonfire in the front yard. I'm dancing around the crates of melting floppy discs and video cards and ethernet, firing wilding into the pyre with my twelve guage.

That's what I want to do. But I don't have it in me. Not yet, anyway. So instead I put on a pot of coffee and call Dell and sit on hold for a few hours, while I surf the internet for potential solutions to the problem.

I'm holding on this Dell technical support line, and this woman's voice is giving me suggestions like "check to make sure the computer is plugged in". And, you can only imagine how bad it is for them. People to stupid to plug in their computers calling in for support, so you have to feel sorry for them, on some level. But that's not my problem.

So I put in my Express Service Code, and they don't get it for some reason. I typed it into the phone three times, and somehow, that automated female voice doesn't get it. So, eventually she gives up and I'm treading water in some eddy in the phone tree system, slowly drowning. All the while, of course, surfing the net trying to find a solution to this problem.

Hopefully my hard drive hasn't crashed. That would be a bad thing.

I went out onto the web, and found a site with some proposed solutions to the dreaded "NTLDR is missing" error. The first thing I did was make create a 3 1/2" floppy to search for the windows directory. I got it to do what it was supposed to eventually, but then it just gave me a different error. Now, it says:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\system32\hal.dl.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

So, I'm not clear that this is any better.

Then, I called Dell and they told me to hit F12 while it was rebooting, and then we ran a disk diagnostic and it said the hard drive was fine.

Basically, the plan now is to put in the Windows XP CD that came with my computer and try to fix the windows installation, or alternately, to reinstall windows.

I couldn't find my original XP Install disk, of course, but Dell was good enough to send me basically every CD that came with the PC in a box. When I got the shipment, I can't recall exactly what I did, but I think that I called Dell and we just repaired the existing XP installation somehow.

This might be what Dell told me to do - I found this in some notes:

cd ..
c:\ cd "sytem volume information"
dir
verify restore folder
cd _restore{longstring-of-characters}
dir
see all restore points - look for date/time. Then, select the one you want:
cd RP250
dir
cd snapshot
dir
look for system, software, sam, security, and default. All 5 is what matters.
Copy _REGISTRY_MACHINE_SYSTEM c:\windows\system32\config\system
Y
Copy _REGISTRY_MACHINE_SOFTWARE c:\windows\system32\config\software
Y
Copy _REGISTRY_MACHINE_SAM c:\windows\system32\config\sam
Y
Copy _REGISTRY_MACHINE_SECURITY c:\windows\system32\config\security
Y
Copy _REGISTRY_USER_.DEFAULT c:\widnows\system32\config\default
exit