Hi I have this issue which is making me pull my hair out! Can someone please save me from going bald!!!

In the beginning I switched my PC on and on start up I receive an error message box saying “Your system is beginning to dump” or something like that.

When I switched my PC off and switched it on again I was stuck in the DOS screen with a message saying:

NTLDR is missing
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

Not knowing what to do I turned to a forum like this one and was told to type the following command:

COPY ?:i386\ntldr c:\
COPY ?:i386\ntdetect.com c:\

Everything copied fine then when I restarted again I got another message in DOS saying: “NTLDR is compressed”. To overcome this I typed:

CD \
Attrib –c ntldr
Exit

This worked fine and my computer was restored!... For about 2 weeks! Then the NTLDR message happened again but this time it was not letting me get away with the above methods of recovery. Instead at the recovery consol when these commands are typed, I get a new message saying:

COPY does not support wildcards or directory copies

The question is, what do I do now? If anybody can TELL me as to why this is happening to my PC or even has the patients to answer my cry for help, I would be very grateful indeed!

To all you computer geniuses out there this maybe a piece of cake to solve but to me, im ready to throw my bloody computer in the river! So if possible can you please explain a solution in simple laymen’s terms as im a bit of an idiot when it comes to computers.

MANY MANY THANX! (“,)Welcome to the CH forums.

What a pity you didn't tell us what kind of pc we're dealing with, laptop, desktop and are you running XP or Win.2k.

Anyway, a possible reason why ntldr is going awol is because the Master File Table is so fragmented that files have been moved to a secondary MFT which is not searched at boot time. When was the last time you defragged your files? Another possible reason is that your hard drive is failing, hope your backup is up-to-date.

As to cure....

IF you have a floppy drive, on a healthy pc copy ntldr and ntdetect.com to a floppy disk then boot from that floppy disk in the broken system. This will use the boot files from the floppy and load Windows from your hard disk. You can then copy ntldr from the floppy to C:.

Or-

If you do not have a floppy drive goto this site and download the ISO file for "Boot CD - Windows XP Emergency Boot CD (XP SP2 Pro & XP SP2 Home". Burn the ISO file to cd then boot from the CD in the broken system. Note: If you are running Win.2k download the appropriate file for that OS.

Either of the above gives you a come-in-handy emergency boot disk which you can add to your software recovery tool kit.

Or-

Boot to Recovery Console again and ENTER the same copy command as you did before but this time do not use a wildcard (your last entry included a ?). This time enter copy X:\I386\ntldr C: - and - copy X:\I386\ntdetect.com C: where X: is the drive letter of your CDROM. Obviously your Windows cd must be in the cdrom.

Good luck.Thats perfect! I can now log back into my PC now.

Sorry it was a Asus Desktop PC

Although everything is back up and running i have encountered a new problem now. After COPYING your instructions, for some reason all my USB slots are no longer USB 2.0. Meaning that all my hardware will not work as i get a pop up message saying something like: your hardware can perform faster if you plug in to a USB 2.0 port.

Also my SD card slot is not reading any cards in insert

Any ideas?

Thanks (",)

PS: Oh and i cannot defragment my drives even though i have over 15% free space! i click the dive and then the defragment button and nothing happens Sounds like you have one very sick system or your hdd is waving goodbye.

Try running SFC /SCANNOW (have your system cd to hand) and reloading mobo drivers.

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Oh and i cannot defragment my drives even though i have over 15% free space!

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Oh and i cannot defragment my drives even though i have over 15% free space!

That's not very much

I thought had service Pack 2 before all this "bad luck" happened?

Secondly, i also tried the RUN solution you advised: sfc /scannow but a command box came up for a fraction of a millisecond then disappeared and nothing happened