ok,essentially i got a new pc a while back,but it recently went into meltdown,so i am currently TRYING to install XP onto the previous machine.
When i fired up the older machine,ready to install Windows,installation cd in the drive,BIOS set to boot from the cd etc,i got the 'ntldr is missing press alt/ctrl/del to restart',when i restart i get the same thing
I did some looking into the causes of the ntldr errors and tried various things..
ive reformatted the hardrive in another machine
i have swapped optical drives,swapped hardrives,and swapped IDE cables,reset the BIOS to default,checked and rechecked all cables and jumper settings on the motherboard and jumper settings on all drives,same result
ive tried a Windows boot/tools/live disc to no avail,and also a floppy bootdisc
The BIOS appears to see EVERYTHING as it should
Thoughts anyone?
I CANT seem to find much info on this happening at the beginning of a fresh install,almost every site ive looked at(including these forums), is written from the point of view of it happening to an installed version of Windows....and anyway i cant boot from cd or floppy,or get into the recovery console,so i cannot affect any so far found cures
try this:

instead of reformatting on another machine, get a w98 boot disk, use fdisk and delete any/all PARTITIONS on the disk, create/format a partition on the disk, after all is done(2 reboots??) then do a fdisk, sys:c....now reboot and you should come to a windows prompt...w98)...if that all worked fine now RETURN to where you started with trying to install OS from CD...

and make sure your BIOS is set to boot from CD first...Quote

BIOS set to boot from the cd etc,i got the 'ntldr is missing press alt/ctrl/del to restart',