I'm going round and round in circles. The computer had a trojan virus (the user can't remember which one). After he'd used AVG to clean off the virus, he deleted a few other files then restarted his PC. So it came up with a black screen and NTLDR missing message.
I created a CD with boot disk files as per the MS KB instructions. The computer booted up and I copied a few files out of MyDocuments which looked like they might be needed. Then I went into disk managment to check the partitions - it reports a NTFS partition on C: Then I re-ran the virus scanner. So the next step the instruction sheet gave me was to repair the master boot record by using the FIXMBR command from the Windows XP Recovery Console.
So that took me to another sheet which said to restart the computer with the Windows CD. However if I do that, and select R it comes back with a message to say that there is no hard disk.
Somewhere along the line I must have found some other info about the Recovery Console. I decided to download the SP2 pack and followed all the instructions to integrate the XP Service pack 2 files into the Windows XP installation folder because the CD is SP1 and the computer is reporting that it is newer. So all that seemed to work up to the very last step which was Run C:\XPCD\i386\winnt32
This then asked me to enter the key and then as it starts it immediately can't find any of the files it needs to copy, so after telling it to skip a few dozen times, I decided to abort.
I don't quite know where to go next. When I tried to follow the instructions to put the Recovery Console on the hard disk, it said it couldn't find boot.ini
So what should I do now?
I created a CD with boot disk files as per the MS KB instructions. The computer booted up and I copied a few files out of MyDocuments which looked like they might be needed. Then I went into disk managment to check the partitions - it reports a NTFS partition on C: Then I re-ran the virus scanner. So the next step the instruction sheet gave me was to repair the master boot record by using the FIXMBR command from the Windows XP Recovery Console.
So that took me to another sheet which said to restart the computer with the Windows CD. However if I do that, and select R it comes back with a message to say that there is no hard disk.
Somewhere along the line I must have found some other info about the Recovery Console. I decided to download the SP2 pack and followed all the instructions to integrate the XP Service pack 2 files into the Windows XP installation folder because the CD is SP1 and the computer is reporting that it is newer. So all that seemed to work up to the very last step which was Run C:\XPCD\i386\winnt32
This then asked me to enter the key and then as it starts it immediately can't find any of the files it needs to copy, so after telling it to skip a few dozen times, I decided to abort.
I don't quite know where to go next. When I tried to follow the instructions to put the Recovery Console on the hard disk, it said it couldn't find boot.ini
So what should I do now?