Doing the same thing over and over -- but expecting different results
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I had a problem where my computer wouldn't boot. In the process of solving the problem I encountered an error message that seems to be a bit of a WTF. Windows 7 looks for a file called <font face="courier new,courier">ntldr</font> when booting (based on the name I assume that file is used by all NT based versions of Windows). If <font face="courier new,courier">ntldr</font> can't be found, Windows won't boot and displays the message:
ntldr is missing
Press Ctrl Alt Del to restart
It's the second line of that error message I don't understand. If you press Ctrl Alt Del as instructed, the only thing that happens is Windows tries to boot again, and fails again, because . . . . <font face="courier new,courier">ntldr</font> is missing. And because <font face="courier new,courier">ntldr </font>is missing, Windows displays the same message, telling you to do exactly what you just did, which doesn't work and can't work because <font face="courier new,courier">ntldr </font>is missing.
What message should be displayed? I really don't know since there's no way to magically teleport the missing <font face="courier new,courier">ntldr</font> onto your hard drive. However, telling me to reboot makes no sense when the problem I'm having is the inability to boot.
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Madness.
source
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@El_Heffe said:
Press Ctrl Alt Del to restart
It's the second line of that error message I don't understand.
It doesn't read "Press Ctrl Alt Del to fix ntldr". It's expecting you to have some ERD or maybe a recovery CD/DVD that you can now insert and press those three keys to restart your computer, in the hope that it will boot off that media and drop you into a recovery shell - from which you can repair the broken NTLDR.
This is no difference to the "Keyboard not detected - press f1 to continue" message that people got. Once they plugged in their keyboard, pressing F1 would allow the BIOS to continue to boot normally.
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I get that error some times when I reboot. If I turn off the computer for 5 minutes, it boots up again fine.