Ok, I’ve made quite a bit of progress since my postings yesterday. I went to various computer help sites and downloaded the files for something called an “Emergency Restore Disk? or “Emergency Recovery Disk? on a floppy. That seems to work, in that it allows me to get past the initial screen and onto my computer normally. But here’s where the catch comes in:

When I try to correct the “Missing NTLDR? problem, I’ve used both the Windows System Restoration CD, and I have even tried to totally reload Windows altogether. The computer then says that for the changes to take effect, Windows must be restarted. However, when I do the computer isn’t reading it as a re-start, but rather right back where I began, as if I was booting on for the first time before any changes were made, where it still needs the floppy to operate and doesn’t yet recognize any of the changes or fixes that have just been installed. In other words, its like the old chicken-or-the-egg problem: for the newly installed files to work, I need a successful re-start, but in order for the computer to get a successful re-start on its own, I need for the newly installed files to work. It’s like a Catch-22.

I’ve read one idea on different help sites, in manually going in and inserting the NTLDR / NTdetec.com / boot.ini files etc. They all say they are root files, but I’m a computer novice of sorts, and I need to know exactly where on Windows 2000 these files are normally supposed to operate from, what file/subfolder/subfolder and so on. Will it work if I go in and manually insert them, or are there better ideas? At least I can now get onto my computer, but only with the help of the floppy.