I am setting up my desktop to dual boot Linux and WinXP.

I finally got it working but when I select 'Windows XP' is says, 'NTLDR is missing, press Ctrl Alt Del to reboot'

Where is NTLDR supposed to be and how do I arrange for it to be used??

Colin

Get your original media and do a repair install. Then gets your drives checked.

Could be a memory problem.

If you've more than 1 bank inside, remove the other('s) and try to start XP. If is work you know already what's the problem, if not, exchange the memory bank and start the Comp again ! Do this for all memory banks you have!

If you have 3 or 4 banks inside, start the comp everytime with 1 only. After find which didnt work, place the others back in and start again.

Clean all memory bank feets with a pencil rubber!

If nothing of this works, do what phazey suggest and do a repair install.

To do this you need to boot from the XP CD and choose the 2. option for repairing, the one comes after the EULA screen where you've to push F8 for to accept the License. This will install XP completly but keep your Settings, Prgrams and Data!

when you installed linux on your system you may of created an additional allocation index forcing the old one out, did you create a boot disk before the install?

Having had problems with multi-boot setups, I've usually found that the BOOT.INI file on your boot drive is pointing to the wrong drive/partition to boot the OS (which is where NTLDR is).

If you have no way to read that file now (since the OS won't boot), then you'll have to move the drive to a working PC (eg plug in as a USB external drive) or boot the current PC from floppy / USB etc. Or maybe you can read it from Linux ?

If that's the problem, you'll need to find out how to construct BOOT.INI lines like this correctly for your setup ...

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

Google will find the help you need.

boot.ini points to a hard-coded partition number - 0, 1, 2 etc. If you move Windows to another physical partition you get that error message. I got that before when I moved to a new hard drive but didn't move a hidden partition that was on the original. Omitting the hidden partition caused the partition numbers to get screwed up.

WinXP install disk has an option to "repair" a windows install which will fix this problem. Or you edit boot.ini from Linux.