NTLDR is missing

A couple of weeks ago, I got presented with the message that NTLDR IS MISSING when booting up the operating system on one of our Windows Server 2003 machine. First, I suggest you check out http://tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm. Did all those methods fail? Then read on …

For me, none of the “obvious” solutions for NTLDR IS MISSING worked, despite all the Googling I did. It turns out that I had inadvertently marked the wrong drive letter as the active partition, which Windows will now make as the bootable drive letter. When I popped in my Windows recovery CD, the drive letters were reversed. C: => D:, and D: => C:. That’s why my OS wouldn’t boot. The only way to flip the drive letters back while preserving data was to do a parallel install of Windows WITHOUT formatting or overwriting the old Windows. After you boot into your 2nd Windows OS, just go to the disk manager and right-click the REAL C: drive with the c:\windows on it, and mark that as the ACTIVE partition. Go ahead and reboot and all should be back to normal. C: => C:, and D: => D:.