Help, cant start my laptop

[sjm]

My laptop does not have a cd drive so i removed the hard drive and installed it in another laptop to install winxp home OS. All installed ok. However when i reinstalled the drive in the original laptop and powered up i got the following message "NTLDR is missing Press any key to restart" Anyone got any idea whats wrong? Thanks SJM

[Hippy]

NTLDR is a little file that directs the first part of the operating system load, it is short for NT Loader. It is needed as at start up the machine cannot read the NTFS on the Hard Drive and needs this litle bootstrap file to get things going at a low level. This file is usally located on a system specific absolute location on the hard drive. It may well be that the HD will perform fine on the machine that created the whole caboodle, but when transferred to another machine of possibly different manufacture or different BIOS version the low level start up fails because the NTLDR file is not at the absolute address on the Hard Drive that the low level boot procedure expects.

[sjm]

Thanks Hippy. One more question, is there anything i can do to get the sys to run on my old machine?

[Hippy]

I doubt it. You will have formatted the disc and installed the OS on your 2nd machine, and it has all the "thumbprints" to work on that system.

I have an external CD Rom drive that plugs into the printer port. It requires a little programme from a floppy disc to get it going. I got it about eight years ago so it's quite old now. Maybe you could pick up one cheap on EBay. With such a thing you can load your OS using the machine on which you intend it to run.

[BRFCC]

This is because when in the machine with the CD-ROM its installed all the windows drivers specific for that machine. When transferred into the other laptop it cant find certain devices your other  one has. Only thing you can do is format the HDD and re-install th O/S