NTLDR Missing

What is NTLDR and where is it?

I have XP running on one PC1. I removed the hard drive from PC1 and hooked it up to PC2 as a slave drive also running XP. On PC2 which now has the HD from PC1 I copied the entire contents from the HD from PC1 to an external drive so that I would have a copy of the OS from PC1. Now I remove the HD from PC2 and hooked up another HD also as a slave drive on PC2. (This new drive was just formatted using Windows formatting utility). I copied the OS from the external drive to this new HD. I have done this many times without any problems and I could always use either HD on PC1. This time for whatever reason beyond me when I tried to use the new HD on PC1 I get NTLRD is missing and I cannot boot.

I went back to PC2 which works and did a search for NTLRD but it couldn't be found on the system. So how does PC2 boot up if NTLRD does not exist and why am I told that when I try to boot up PC1 using the new HD I'm told that NTLRD is missing?

I had the same problem a while back! It refers to the fact that it can not find the Operating System on the device or drive. Try switching channels, boot order, etc.

your boot file is pointing to the wrong place. the easiest answer is to use the os install disk and do a repair install. make sure you searched for ntldr not ntlrd. It's a hidden file and search (and copy) don't normally find hidden/system files. In addition you can come up with problems if the file is locked when you are trying to copy it.

other possibilites that can cause this: bios trying to boot from slave drive, trying to boot from a floppy disk, non-bootable cd with system files on it, etc.

I beginning to think it was like you said; trying to boot from a slave drive. As of now I can't verify that was the reason as I have since changed things around but it sounds to me like it must have been this reason. Also, I probably did search for NTLRD