Data Loss if NTLDR is Missing and Recovery

NTLDR or New Technology Loader is a boot loader. It used in the Windows NT and later versions of Windows including Windows XP, Window Server 2003 and Windows Vista. It is the most important part of the Windows operating system for booting it. It generally run from hard drive, but you can run it from removable storage like CD and Floppy drives also. NTLDR needs, at least, the following three files:-

1. NTLDR that holds the main boot loader
2. boot.ini that contains boot configuration options
3. NTDetect.com that is used to detect the basic computer hardware

In NT based operating systems, NTLDR is the most important booting file. It performs several tasks during the booting process. These tasks include:

• Loads the file system (FAT or NTFS) on boot drive
• If hiberfil.sys file is found, its contents are loaded in the memory and the system resumes where it left off.
• Else, reads the boot.ini and prompts the user with boot menu consequently.
• NTLDR runs ntdetect.com that gathers information regarding the hardware components of the computer.
• Begin stoskenl.exe, and pass the information to it that was returned by ntdetect.com.

The successful booting of the system is possible only if the NTLDR is working properly. If it doesn’t work system can’t boot.

Sometimes, when you start our system, you may receive an error message-
“NTLDR is missing, press any key to restart”

This error in generally occurs when any of the required NTLDR file (Ntldr, boo.ini and ntdetect.com) does not exists. These files may corrupt or delete due to virus attack or improper shutdown of the system. In this situation, your computer can’t boot. In this case, you can start your computer with the help of boot disk. You can make the boot disk by following these steps:

1. Insert a blank CD/Floppy disk in proper drive of any healthy system.
2. Copy Ntldr, boot.ini and nedetect.com files from c:\windows\1386 folder
3. Write these files to disk and start your system with this disk.

After successful running of the system, you can fix this problem by copying these missing files in c:\windows\1386 folder.

Although, it’s not a big problem, it can be solved very easily. But in case, if you fail to do it, you need to reinstall your operating system. And it is essential that when you reinstall your operating system, you have to format the particular drive. It may possible that when your operating system gets corrupted, it may cause some serious data loss and can put you in dilemma. It is the situation for you where you can’t decide that what should it do? Sometimes general user thinks that it is the end of line for the data and the data is lost forever. But these data are still recoverable. You can recover these lost data with the help of data recovery software.

Data recovery software are the software programs that can recover lost, deleted or formatted data from damaged or corrupted storage devices. These are very simple and easy to use data recovery software that a general user without any prior technical knowledge. Data recovery software assure you to recover data up to the maximum level.