I somehow knew I was making a mistake, yet I continued on with my ignorance anyway. My hard drive failed in my Dell Vostro laptop, which was still under warranty - so Dell shipped a new hard drive out to me straight away - they even “preloaded” it for me… Nice in theory, except the installation would not “take” - blue screens for hours trying to set my laptop back up.
If you are in a hurry or desperate, you can skip to the proposed “fix” here.
I eventually gave up on their preloaded OS, and installed Windows on a second partition. included with the refurbished hard drive Dell sent me - 30 minutes later, Windows was up and running flawlessly on my D: drive. However - while I know a great deal about how to make my PC faster and tips and tricks to get more mileage out of my computer - I fully admit that I do not know a lot about the inner workings of a PC and its system dependencies… I was planning on installing Ubuntu on the C: drive because I thought that my Windows installation was only housed on the D: drive - man, was I wrong.
I was using Partition Magic and after I formatted “C”, I received the “NTLDR is missing” error message. I was not happy. I actually searched for “ntloader is missing”, which seems to be pretty common, and I did find a way to regain access to my Windows installation. Which, I am using this “fix” now - though I am still looking for the permanent solution.
Accessing Windows with the NTLDR is Missing Error
The answer (or a likely answer) to the missing NT Loader file error can be found on the TinyEmpire website. The information there was a little bit difficult to navigate there, either due to the colors, the lack of spaces between lines or whatever - but the proposed solution to the missing NTLDR file worked for me, at least it’s allowing me to access my laptop again - which is how I am able to write this right this moment.
The good stuff starts at the heading,”Make a NTLDR boot disk to get back into Windows.“. Personally, my laptop has the option to boot from a USB flash drive, so that is the option I used. I simply had to download a small file, format my USB drive, add a few files, and then try one of the ten boot options. I was able to bypass the NTLDR is missing error within ten minutes of plugging my USB stick into the back of my laptop.
If you have run into the NT Loader is missing error, and especially if you do not have a recent backup of your important files - go to this website and follow the instructions. Once you are able to access your Windows desktop again, make a backup of your files immediately, and also try to remember which option enabled you to access Windows again.
I am still looking for the permanent fix to this problem, maybe something that is a true NTLDR error repair, but this workaround is stable - I’ve rebooted my laptop no less than 5 times while still dealing with this error.
I’ll update this page when I find the permanent solution to this problem, but until then, this website should be able to help you out right now.