Alright, my friend has been trying to reformat his computer for several days. He finally got a windows xp prof. cd mailed to him by his brother. During the installation, the installer said that quite a bit of files could not be copied. (Possibly the cd was damaged during shipment) Either way, now the computer will not boot from the windows xp cd. Instead, it gives the "NTLDR is missing" error. I've changed the boot order so that it looks only at the cdrom drive, and also other variations. I found a interesting site (here) that has a neat tool that supposedly detects errors relating to the nt loader not being present. Anywho, this site assumes that the computer once had windows on it already, and tries to simply fix the present windows installation.

This isn't our case. This computer does not have windows on it. It only has several dll and font files. The installation was stopped rather quickly. Infact, it doesn't even reach to nice user interface part of the installation - it aborts at that blue screen, with the grey information bar at the bottom, if anyone remembers this stage of a windows xp install.

So, the tool on this site most likely wouldn't.. and didn't work. I didn't think it would, but didn't hurt to try. Does anyone know how to get to a spot that I can actually do something? Atleast just boot back up with this windows xp cd? Maybe, delete this bad partition? This is possibly the worste error i've encountered during a windows installation. lol.

Thanks for any help.

Well to format the disk you can either connect ti to another computer and format that way, or boot off of the WinXP cd and format it while installing Windows again. ALl you need to d is reformat and reinstall, that basically solves everything.

I don't know if my post was clear. It will not boot from the cdrom drive. I don't know. I've really given up. It's too stressing. heh.

Does the CD-ROM not work?
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Did you change the BIOS setting to boot from the CD-ROM?
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Hook up another CD-ROM and try it that way.

If the CD-ROM is damaged, you can't boot from it.

If the CD-ROM is damaged, there's a good chance the hard-drive isn't damaged. You don't need to delete the bad fragment.

Solution:
Replace the CD. They're free!