On Intel-based computers, the system partition should be a primary partition that needs to be marked as active to start the computer. This partition should be placed on the disk that the computer accesses at the startup. However, there may occur a situation in which you are unable to start the system because of the loss of critical boot files. In such cases, you should restore the missing files to recover partition. If the problem is not solved by doing this, then an efficient third-party partition recovery software must be used to do the needful.

Consider a situation in which you are using Windows XP and marked the primary partition as active with the help of Windows Disk Management snap-in tool. However, when you restart the computer, it does not start and you may receive the following error message:

“NTLDR is missing.

Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.”

Cause:

Such issues occur if the partition that you marked as active does not have the required Windows boot files or the boot files for any other operating system.

Resolution:

This problem can be solved using any of the following methods:

Change the active partition: You should change the active partition using the following steps:
Insert the Windows Millennium Edition (Me) boot floppy disk to boot to the command prompt.
Type ‘fdisk’ at the command prompt and press Enter.
Click ‘Yes’ to enable large disk support.
Click ‘Set active partition’ and press the number of the partition that you want to make active and press Enter.
Press ESC, remove the floppy disk and restart the computer.
Replace the necessary startup files: If the critical boot files are missing, then you should restore them by using the following steps:
Start the system using Windows XP CD, and press F10 or R when the ‘Welcome to Setup’ screen is displayed.
Press C to start the Recovery Console.
Type the following commands to go to the root drive and copy the ‘ntldr’ file to the system. Press Enter after every command:
cd ..
cd i386
Copy ntldr c:
Copy ntdetect.com c:
Bootcfg /add
Type ‘exit’ and press Enter to exit Recovery Console and restart the system.

If the problem is not solved using these methods, then you should use a third-party partition recovery utility to recover all the inaccessible data. These data recovery tools are read-only in nature that use fast and sophisticated scanning algorithms to recover data without any difficulty.

The most reliable Windows partition recovery software that recovers lost, deleted, or formatted data from FAT, NTFS, and exFAT partitions is Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery. Supporting different storage devices such as hard drives, iPods, memory cards, etc, this partition recovery software is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP, 2000, and NT4(SP6).