Why do I get the dreaded “NTLDR is missing, press any key to restart” error?

At boot-up, the BIOS of your computer tries to locate the primary hard drive’s active partition to read the first sector for the Master Boot Record and uses that info to load the rest of the Operating System.  In the earlier versions of Windows i.e Windows NT /Windows 2000 and Windows XP the MBR is pointed to the NTLDR or New Technology Loader.  The “NTLDR is missing, press any key to restart” error can occur for a variety of reasons including when the BIOS didn’t look for the right drive, didn’t find the MBR, or the MBR didn’t list NTLDR in the right place or  the location of NTLDR changed.

But Windows Vista does not use NTLDR

That is right. Windows Vista does not use NTLDR. Then why does Vista throw up the NTLDR missing error? According to the official microsoft site the NTLDR missing in Vista error can occur only if you have migrated from an earlier version of windows to Vista that too only when you have used some imaging software to install the earlier windows version.

How to fix NTLDR missing error in Vista

The official microsoft support center talks about the correct method for fixing this issue as well. The process mentioned on this page is quite self explanatory. Let me know if you have any doubts about the NTLDR is missing error and I shall help you out. BTW you may also like to read my explanation of difference between intel core2duo and dual core processors and how to format USB flash drive.

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