Missing NTLDR and cannot reformat!

Hi everyone, I tried to reformat my Dell 630m notebook, but it won't allow me to get into the setup screen because when it saids "Press any key to continue.." then it saids "CDBOOT: NTLDR IS MISSING." As of now, I cannot boot up to the window screen and whenever I tried to, it just restart itself. Very recently, I have experienced that my cd rom is running very slow. I tried to install a game and it took me several hours. On the other hand, it took my friend's notebook about half an hour. Could it be that my cd rom is dying and I need a replacement for it? Also, I tried to put in a clean hard drive into my notebook and see if that was the case. However, it was not, and it still saids "CDBOOT: NTLDR IS MISSING" and it saids "Press Ctrl Alt Del to restart." I've ran out of ideas about how to fix this notebook. In fact, I called Dell and they said it would cost me $49 to fix this problem because my warranty was over. To avoid this fee can anyone please help me? By the way, the OS for this notebook is XP Home Service Pack 2. If I needed to buy a new cd rom for this noteboo, how do I change it? Thank you in advance.

 

You got a reply to your cnet post. Have you read that one yet? Have you read your manual (they usually explain where the drive is and how to remove it)?

 

Try taking your friend's CD-ROM out and putting it in yours.

on the bottom of the notebook there usually is a screw to lock the drive in place, or if the drive is hot-swap, there might be a locking mechanism on the front face of the drive. once the drive is out, the faceplate **should** be removable. (Try putting the drive into your notebook first, to see if the faceplate will get in the way)

(i've never taken the faceplate off personally, though).

then, the drive should just slide into your notebook.

 

you don't have a usb flash drive plugged in do you.. if so, it could be it's reading the usb and trying to boot from it.... it's happened b4

 

Also, try disabling your memory card reader.

 

it does sound like your cd/dvd drive is having problems reading the disc. either the disc is bad or the drive is bad. :/

 

Yeah, there's no usb plugged in and I tried using several different XP Home disc. But thank you for the replies and I'll look into the CD drive to see if that's the problem. Thank you so much guys.

 

Check this out:

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm