Ntldr Is Missing, On My Compaq Laptop And It Wont Boot From A Disc.

I have a 2004 Compaq Presario laptop. The specs are AMD XP-m 3000+ Processor single core, Optical dvd/cd drive, 256 mb ram, 30 GB hard drive 5in1 card reader, and a phoenix BIOS. I just bought it and turned it on and it says the ntldr is missing press alt-ctrl-del to restart. so i got a new windows 2000 disc and tried to reinstall windows, but i am having trouble getting it to boot from the cd. I set everything in the BIOS to boot from cd and disabled everything else. I hear the cd spinning and i'm not getting any error messages or any other messages. I did an HDD self test through the BIOS the long and short test and everything came back as passed. I'm not really sure what to do from here. I only want to put windows on it so i can download a linux distro and run that. i dont have access to a computer or i would just make a linux disk and go from there. I had a puppy linux disk that was scratched and wouldnt load all the way so i know the cd drive works fine. any help would be really appreciated.

 

Hi schultz6188. Welcome to Computer Help Forums.
If you disconnect the HDD will it boot from the CD?

 

In addition to DSTM's question in post #2..

How confident are you of the integrity of your "New Windows 2000 disk"....Did you get the disk from a friend or off the internet?

 

More than likely the CD ROM is shot, use 95 or XP which you can install from a flash drive and run a distro from that :nod:
Google / You tube it and you'll get plenty of places for the process :up:

I install all our laptops not on the network via USB, any on the network we just use Network Deployment