[this question was asked by Stuart in our newsletter - Ray's Computer Tips]

    Out of the blue, when re-booting my Win XP Pro SP2 OS, I received the message "NTLDR missing...." error.

    [note from Ray - I deleted several paragraphs here which told about the many ways that he tried to solve this problem (including using WinRescue), but was not able to]

    Perhaps this is a worthy candidate for you to build a tool to automatically repair this problem.

    Any help will be greatly appreciated.

    NTLDR is the first file that your computer looks for when starting up.  NTLDR then directs your computer to load Windows.  The solutions that you found simply are finding a copy of NTLDR and some of the other files that it uses and copying them to the C drive where they should be.  WinRescue regularly backs up these files and a restore should have worked.  If it didn't work, either you do not have backups of these files, the files were restored to the wrong drive (sometimes Windows switches drive letters and so D or E may be the drive to copy them to), or the absence of these files is not your problem.

    If I were to write a program to solve your problem it would simply do what WinRescue (http://regvac.com/rescuexp.htm) already does.

    If you do not have a floppy drive, we have a XP Recovery CD Maker (http://www.xp-recovery-cd.com) which will make a boot CD (which would also have the NTLDR files on it).

Follow up to NTLDR problem.

Received expert advice via internet recommending that I check Disk Manager (by right clicking on My Computer, selecting Manager /Disk Manager) to insure that the C:\drive was active primaryl.  Inexplicably, the c:\needed to be activated.

WinRescue b/u may have restored pertinent files but this was a hardware not software issue.

Problem solved.  

   It sounds like the problem was what I had suggested: Windows was switching your drive letters so that your C drive was not the one that Windows was trying to boot from.