Lenovo laptop "Missing NTDLR"

[bubba]

Ok, I'm about ready to pitch this thing out the window. A co-worker brought me a Lenovo lappy that his fire department uses to have me look at it, he tells it me blue screens booting into windows (XP Pro).

I told him I would look it over, well the Lenovo diagnostics program tells me that the NTDLR is missing. Ok the boot loader is hosed, break out my XP disk to run the repair to replace the 'ntdlr' and 'ntdetect.com' files and the repair console says it can't find the disk.

The BIOS sees the disk, XP splash screen comes up like it wants to start, and F8 to get to the safe mode list works (but doesn't boot). So I know the hard drive is accessable.

I guess my question is, what the hell am I missing? why won't the recovery console see the drive?

Any one know another way to replace these files?

[Apoptosis]

format and reinstall ;)

[bubba]

Yeah that is what I'm thinking now, the more I dig the more I find forked up. I'll tell he screwed, and hope that they had stuff backed up (I highly doubt).

[dicecca112]

Linux Live CD and USB Drive to get info off, then format and reinstall

[InspectahACE]

interesting on just having to reinstall.. I had this happen to a desktop about a week ago when i added 2 extra sata HD's..Apparently when I connected the Main HD and one of the 2 new HD's to the sata ports that are pointed to the right(when lookin at board..) and the other HD to the other ports(that point straight out when looking at mobo) But when i took the HD off the ports running to the side and put it to the ports that other new HD is, all was well after that.. Cuz I told my friend to reinstall Windows before that, which would have sucked since he didn't get to back up his work stuff lol...Im sure this wasn't too relevant as this was a laptop issue but figured since it was a similar issue id drop a post

[bubba]

I'm thinking of yanking the drive and sticking it in my desktop to see about getting the data off of it. Since its SATA this shouldn't an issue should it?

[dicecca112]

make sure your bios points to your HDD and not the other, or you'll be booting off the wrong HD, if you did it right, then yeah it should just show up as an extra hdd

[ViPeR.Ja]

with some computers wouldnt u have to load the hard drive driver like for achi or something. try seeing if that laptop has a driver like that u might have to load b4 the recovery console

[vicaphit]

I had no problem reading SATA disks immediately by just plugging them in. I could see all of the data and it worked just like a hard drive. This is Vista though, I don't know what XP would do in this case.