This happened to me once before, and I didn’t write down how to fix it then. This time I will, just so I can look it up easily next time.
If your ntldr goes missing, here’s one way to fix it:
- Boot from your Windows XP SP2 CD.
- Choose the “R” option to repair using a recovery console.
- copy ntldr and ntdetect.com from the i386 folder on the boot CD to the windows hard drive root.
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- Double check that the boot order of the hard drives in the BIOS is still how it should be (for some reason my order was messed up, so the system tried to boot from the wrong drive, which puzzled me quite a bit.)
That last point messed me up for a good twenty minutes this time around.
But now everything is good again.