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Incident Report: Floppy Boot

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Booted up my PC, the lights blinked and whirred a bit, and then, on a totally empty screen, this text appeared:

NTLDR is missing
Press any key to restart

Attempting to reboot again produced identical results. Scratching my head a bit, and considering that this appeared very early in the boot process, I proceeded to check the cables, empty the CD and floppy drives, check that power was connected, and tried once more. Lo and behold, it booted normally.

Searching for enlightenment on this error message led me to webopedia.com:

Often a user will see the message "NTLDR is Missing" after attempting to install Windows 2000 or Windows XP, or upgrade a Windows 95-based or Windows 98-based computer to Windows 2000 or Windows XP. The message appears after the first reboot. This occurs only if Windows 95 or 98 has been installed on a drive with the FAT32 file system.

But at no point did I upgrade, change, fold, spindle or mutilate my operating system. All I did... was leave a floppy disk in my drive.

• A computer-savvy person might know that PCs attempt to boot from a floppy before the hard drive, if a floppy is present. But said person might have forgotten a floppy was loaded (guilty as charged). Be that as it may, I would argue that the message "Non-bootable floppy" beats "NTLDR is missing" by a mile.
• Dissecting further, one might assume that "NTLDR" could be parsed as NT-LDR, or NT-loader. Peculiar, since I was not running Windows NT...

A good OS for a personal PC, I would have given a higher grade if it did not crash so often.

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