I had an 80 gig sataHD with XP home on it and I bought A 500 gig sata and put 7 on it. I got all my info off the c drive (80 gig) and wanted to reformat it but it is set as primary and disk manager won't let me do it. I then decided to give it to my husband for his computer but when I unplug it and try to boot directly into 7 I get the message NTLDR is missing Press Ctrl Alt Del to Restart. I plug my old drive back in and it works great. I use 7 all the time and would love to ditch XP. I am not sure what info to include so if you need any please ask.

This happens because the boot information for both is on the XP drive. You can remove it (XP Drive)and boot from the Windows 7 DVD and select repair (startup repair)and it will create the correct boot data on that drive.

Actually I thought to try that but I can't seem to burn a good disk. I loaded the iso file onto my 80 gig then unziped it into a file on the same drive and installed from there to my 500 gig. I have tried it twice with ingburn with no luck, once burning the iso to disk ( made a nice frisbie) and once from the open file (would not format my dvd). I have read alot about it but just can't get it right. My husband has his ISO on his computer. If he is successfull in making a disk could I use his for repair only? If not could someone talk me thru the burn assuming I know only how to turn a computer on as I am missing something somewhere. Thank you so much for all the help. This is a great tool to check for any problem.

When you install Windows 7, Windows Recovery Environment will be also installed on local disk. Therefore we do not need installation disc when trying to repair the boot engines. Please unload the Windows XP drive. Then start Windows 7, press F8 to enter a boot menu. Then select Repair Your Computer. Please run Startup and Repair to repair the boot engine. If it does not work, please boot in command prompt, enter the following command to recover BCD store. bcdboot c:\windows /l en-us /s c: You can also run this command after boot in Windows 7 with the Windows XP partition connected. After running the command, reboot and run Startup Repair again.

Thank you so much. I finally got brave and tried this last suggestion and it worked! I am breathing a huge sigh of relief. This is the first time I have ever tried something in command prompt and I thank you again for the step by step. I got it and I am now free of XP. It was good but 7 is much better. I would still like to know the exact steps to burn an install disk so I have it on hand. I am taking A+ classes and I may decide to put it on the computer I am building in that class if it is better than my existing one. I have made 2 Frisbees now so I am missing something. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a million!

Link:How to write an image file to a disc with ImgBurn

This is the page I found and followed. I have tried it twice but it says the ISO file was created then I go to look at it to confirm it is there and I see nothing on the disk. Also it will not run to install. I didn't know if I need to open the ISO to a file and burn the files to a disk unzipped? Any suggestions?

I found the answer to my question. I had been using some old, low quality dvd-r's. I tried 2 additional ones and they would not even show as ready in the application. I got some new, higher quality dvd-r's and got a good disk the first try. Thanks to all who gave advice and suggestions.

Im having a similar issue. I got the digital river downloadable version of windows 7. I installed it on my 250gb sata hd so that i could format and discard the 80gb ide hd that i was running xp on. The install was flawless and everything working great. My new 1tb sata hd came today and i wanted to install it. I plugged it in and unplugged the old 80gb hd, booted up, made sure the new drive was detected and exited bios. Upon exiting bios i was greeted with the NTLDR is missing message. I tried unplugged the 1tb drive and booting as well as plugging the old 80gb xp drive back and booting but neither works. When i plug in the 80gb xp drive bios doesnt see it. Any work around? As i stated previously i downloaded windows 7 and do not have any disks.