okay, now I need some serious help.

[Infinity_Wasted]

here are my first 2 posts on my problem, for reference:

My First Post

My Second Post

here's the low down: around the beginning of December, Windows started messing up with freezing, random reboots, BSOD, etc. yesterday, at 10:15AM, my computer died completely. it made a long whining sound, and when I restarted, it said "NTLDR missing. Press Ctrl+Alt+Dlt to restart."

at first, I thought, "okay, good riddance, now I can format the drive, reinstall Windows and everything will be clean again."

so I did that. but something went wrong during the installation process, I don't know- it gave the same error message. so I did it again, and again, and again. same thing every time. I even put in the Seagate Maintenaince tools that came with my Seagate Hard Drive, (my other hard drive is a Seagate, not a Western Digital, sorry for the confusion), and did a Zero Fill Format- that's where it permanently deletes all the data by filling the hard drive with a string of Zeros.

in all rights, it should have found nothing but an 80 GB hard drive filled with 0's. but it didn't. it said the same message. even after reinstalling Windows again!

I don't get it. I am in need of serious help here. I've reformatted and reinstalled Windows on that hard drive at least 2 other times other than the initial doing-so when I first got the drive and my copy of Windows. but this time, I don't know what's going on.

Please help me. I just want my computer to work again...

 

[exit2dos]

This error can be caused by a bad or loose IDE cable - check the connections on your drives & mobo - Ideally, try replacing the cables if you have extras. Also check the connectors on your drives and mobo to make sure there are no bent/broken pins.

Also, check the Master/Slave/CS jumpers on all of your drives (including the cd drive). Make sure they are all set correctly.

Make sure when you are installing Windows, that the cd drive is set as your primary boot device in the BIOS. The "NTLDR missing" error is telling you that it can't find a bootable disk.

 

[Infinity_Wasted]

thank you. also, my computer is starting to get dusty. when it's on, it's bathed in a blue light from the CPU fan, but I opened it up just a few minutes ago and found that it was horribly dusty! I'm guessing to much dust in the connections can cause the same problem.

thank you so much for the advice. I desperately need any kind. hehe.. :?

 

[Infinity_Wasted]

okay. I fixed it. I fixed my computer!







well, not really. there was actually nothing wrong with it- except for dust.

that's right, DUST killed my computer! after I vacuumed it out, it was fine. in fact, it went right to the Windows loading screen. I can't believe I went through all of that to find out that my computer was just dusty... all that sh*t just to find out it was dusty.

let that be a lesson to all of you who don't clean your computers.

 

[exit2dos]

Nice - great to see that worked.

It's not often that you can say that the solution that worked was the one that sucked. [/bad pun]