Okay im getting extremely fed up with this now.. this has to be the 4th time i've reformatted in the last 5 days.

Asus M2A-VM mobo
Western digital 500 GB sata hd (os installed on this one)
250 gb Western digital ide slave drive
plextor dvd writer
amd athalon x2 64
2 gb ram XMS2 corsair

okay so the first few times i reformatted i couldn't get the os to load without the xp cd that was cuz of the sata drivers not installed. I figured that out, made a boot floppy with the sata drivers did the f6 stuff before installing installed the drivers and everything was good.

however after a few days i got some worms and trojans on the computer most likely through the antivirus program i had on there, random pop ups would just appear, couldn't access the TASK manager, anytime i would install an antivirus program or spyware program it would install and just not load. I got fed up and reformatted the system but now is where the problem comes in this time when i reformatted i was installing my mobo drivers and when prompted to restart i get the message

NTLDR is missing
Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart

tried the repair CONSOLE and i still keep getting the same message
it only works if i have the xp cd in the drive, won't boot any other way..

plz help im gettin extreeeemly frustrated with this now.. reformat again. Something apparently corrupted the drive.


Speaking of which- how old is the Hard Drive?

by motherboard drivers- do you MEAN the SATA controller drivers, or the motherboard drivers AFTER windows was installed?it sounds like the hard drive is slow dying....

How old is it???

Edit - BC _ programmer bet me to itthe hd is brand new

and i mean the mobo drivers after windows is installed..

http://forums.techguy.org/windows-nt-2000-xp/597060-windows-only-boots-cd.html

i found this thread hopefully this HELPS, im gonna try the floppy boot and copy the bootini, ntdetect, and ntdlr files hopefully that works.. i really don't know what else to do.. Can you start recovery console from the CD?yes i can