Booting from wrong partition (RESOLVED)

[AsterixSmeagol]

I am getting the error "NTLDR is missing" when I try to boot my computer after attempting to put a new partition on it. I think the new blank partition was made active and the computer is trying to boot from it instead of the partition with everything on it. I've looked around online for solutions, but they all seem to be for people running two operating systems.

[jholland1964]

Here are several links I found which may help;

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/findby...rmissingxp.htm

http://www.tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm

[AsterixSmeagol]

I've gotten it now so I can get the XP loading screen to come up, but then it just restarts.

[jholland1964]

Can you get to Safe Mode?

[AsterixSmeagol]

Nope. I can get the option of booting into safe mode, and it does the thing where all of those DOS commands scroll down the screen and the XP loading screen comes up, but then it still just reboots. I'm also tried doing a system recovery to try to fix the problem, which resulted in the same thing: instant restarts at the loading screen.

The only thing I can think to do is to just format the drive and do a system recovery again. Will system recovery discs (DVDs) still work on formated drive?

[jholland1964]

Can you get the computer to boot to the cd? If so then put in the System Restoration CD and actually you would just follow the prompts, which generally reformats and then reloads the os, giving you pretty much what you had when it came from the factory...what make of computer is it? What are all the disks that you have?

[AsterixSmeagol]

I have an HP m400y. It came with XP Media Center 2004. My restoration discs are the discs that came with the computer. They only have two options (which are both just buttons to click): non-destructive recovery and destructive recovery. I tried both options, but even the destructive recovery left the partitions intact, it just restored all of the data on them to factory settings.

Just to clarify, the hard drive is 150 GB, and has two partitions, one 6 GB Recovery partition, and one 142 GB partition that now has only the OS installed on it. There is also 1 GB of unallocated space between the two partitions that is where the third partition I tried to create was placed originally. That extra GB was originally part of the Recovery partition, I think, because (if I recall correctly), the Recovery partition used to be 7 GB. I'm not quite sure about that because I never really paid that much attention to how big it was as I never had any intention of messing with those files.

[Gizmokid2005]

Do you have any actual XP cds available? Or know where you can borrow one?

[AsterixSmeagol]

No, everyone I know has had XP pre-installed on their computer. Since I've already done a destructive restoration, I don't have anything on the drive that I need to keep. Would it be bad to just format the drive completely erasing everything and then use my system recovery discs?
Thanks for all your help, I really appreciate it.

[Gizmokid2005]

I don't think it would be bad...the only thing is if that recovery partition contains actual recovery data that the CD's will pull from to reload the computer. If the CDs contain all the info needed, then no, you could completely format the drive and reinstall w/o issues.