NTLDR is missing
A customer presented a Dell Inspiron/Windows XP laptop wich was booting to the “NTLDR is missing” message.
I started working though the usual solutions – remove any removeable media, replace NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM, check boot.ini . . . As I was using fdisk from Knoppix to check which hard disk partition Windows was on (to confirm that the boot.ini entry was correct) I noticed that one of the disgnostic/recovery partitions was set to be bootable, and that the main NTFS partition was not. I changed the NTFS partition to be the bootable partition and rebooted. Windows XP then booted normally.