hey guys, yesterday i had this problem and i'm not sure what caused it. i forgot to remove a game disc when i shut down and when i turn it on, i took the cd while the computer is posting and shortly after when there's like a flicking white underscore in the top left it tells me that ntldr is missing press ctrl-alt-del to restart. did the cd cause all this problem.
no, either your hard drive has gone bad or your windows install has got corrupted. Replace the harddisk and/or reinstall windows.
same thing happened to me before, did the exact mistake that you did It turned out that it was trying to boot from the CD drive, so I had to go into the BIOS to set it back to the hard disk
i press f10 to set which device to boot from manually and selected my hard disk and it still does the same thing. i reinstalled xp and seems to be working fine now. i just want to make sure that the cd mistake cause this problem and not some kind of hard ware problem. can comeone confirm this?
no, it was not the cd. the problem occured because the windows bootloader was unable to find ntldr on your hard disk. Nothing to do with the cd at all.
so why did this ntldr thing occur? i know it shuts down fine before it occur and don't think i did any software or hardware changes with it.