install ntldr after the fact?

Hi, on new drive, w98se has the MBR I guess, tho it's a dual boot with XP pro my preferred boot. I tried FDisk to have the XP pro active. That went fine, but on (windows) boot, message came up that the NTLDR (which I believe is the bootloader for XP) couldn't be found. Can I change something (in text) so that the XP partition boots directly & is read as the C: drive? (Please note that about 1 yr. ago I seemed to have done this right on my wife's PC, but I didn't keep notes. In both instances I used Partition Magic 6).
Thank you.

 

You may want to enter the Recovery Console and fix your boot and mbr.

This "quickboot" floppy for XP contains ntldr and should allow you to boot into XP. You may need only edit your boot.ini file to change default boot behavior.

http://www.svrops.com/svrops/downloads/zipfiles/xpprobt.exe

Post the boot.ini here so we can advise you.

 

If it's a dual boot done the standard way by loading XP after 98 is installed, the MBR will be the XP version - or should be. I'm not really sure how a dual-boot done with PM will behave but to run properly, the MBR needs to be XP structured.

Also, at a guess your ntldr isn't missing but the system is confused on where/how to find it.

I agree with Abraxas that recovery console and fixmbr along with maybe fixboot. Take a look Here for the available options.