NTLDR is Missing problem (ON SINGLE BOOT VISTA??)

Heres the situation.. I have a Dell XPS M1330 running factory Vista, which i have owned for almost a year with not many issues. I have never attempted to install or dual boot another operating system. What I have done was a factory install of Vista off the cd that came with my computer, but that was quite some time ago. My computer was working fine, then all of a sudden one day I tried to turn it on and BAM..

"NTLDR is missing... Press any key to restart"

Obviously pressing a key just makes the message pop up again.

Solutions I have tried:

I have inserted the Vista cd that came with my computer and attempted to "Repair" vista... I ran startup diagnostics which was a suggestion from someone, and the diagnostics found a problem, which it then fixed and restarted my computer. When the computer came back on, the NTLDR problem was still there with nothing changed, except when I went back and tried to run start-up diagnostics again, it said there was no problem found. I ran it like 100 times anyway but it did not fix the problem, so please don't suggest I use this function it does not work for me.

I have also attempted messing around with the BIOS settings, changing the boot order and what-have-you, but i only have one HDD so that didn't do much good.

IF ANYBODY CAN HELP ME PLEASE TELL ME WHAT TO DO. I HAVE IMPORTANT WORK ON THE COMPUTER THAT I HAD YET TO BACK-UP, AS WELL AS ALL MY MUSIC. And how can this god damn problem happen to a laptop with factory vista and no attempt at installing XP ever?!

 

The odd thing about this is Vista doesn't use NTLDR.

Boot into the recovery console from your setup disk.

type bootrec /FixBoot

 

For your files, you can make a linux LiveCd and boot into that to get them. It's easy, just download the iso file off any linux distros site and burn it to a dvd.

 

While this doesn't solve your NTLDR problem, you could alternatively remove your hard drive, grab an external enclosure and get your data that way.

 

WOOO SURFASB thank you!! FixBoot command solved my issue after running a diagnostic test. Thanks to others for advice on data recovery and im glad it didn't come to that.

I still have no idea how this XP problem showed up on my Vista computer.

 

It's not an XP problem. It's when the MBR gets corrupt or something and can't locate Vista's bootloader.

I know. The error msg is real confusing.

 

The ol' fixboot procedure did the trick huh...good job surfasb. You know just yesterday I was working on someone's XP machine that had this exact error. Unfortunately neither the fixboot nor fixmbr commands I tried fixed it...I then resorted to trying a "Repair" and I never had the option to do that so I had to reinstall the OS. The guy didn't have any info/data on the drive that was needed so it was all good. I just reinstalled, updated the drivers and he was on his way again.

 

Odd.

You know, when a machine doesn't boot up, I end up throwing the whole toolkit at it. I'm not enough of a geek to decipher these error msgs.