Is your Windows system unbootable after marking the primary partition active? Are you getting error message about missing system files at startup? This behavior indicates that critical boot files of your Windows computer are missing and it cannot boot up. It renders your system unbootable and all your critical files inaccessible. This causes serious file loss situations and needs File Recovery Software to be fixed up, if you do not have an updated backup.

In a practical scenario, your computer may not boot up and come across the below error message after you mark your primary partition as active with the help of Windows Disk Management snap-in utility:

“NTLDR is missing. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.”

The above error message occurs every time when you try to boot your Windows operating system-based computer.

Cause

Microsoft Windows may produce this behavior, if the hard drive partitions, which is marked as active, doesn't contain the boot files of Windows or another operating system (if it is a dual-boot computer). On Intel-based machines, the system or boot partition must be the primary partition, which is marked as active for for the startup purposes.

The partition needs to be located on hard drive that the system gains access to while booting. You can set only one partition as active at a time. If you need to use another OS, you need to first mark the system partition of another partition as active before rebooting the system.

Solution

In order to sort out this issue, use any of the below methods:

• Try to change the active Windows partition by booting your system to floppy disk and then use disk utilities for manually modifying the active partition.

• Boot the system using Microsoft Windows boot disk.

• Copy Ntldr file from Windows boot CD/DVD to root directory using Windows Recovery Console.

• Use Windows Disk Management Snap-in for resetting original boot partition as active and then reboot your computer.

You must backup your files before applying any of the above fixes. If you do not backup files and a failure occurs, file loss situations take place. In such cases, File Recovery Software becomes need of hour.

The File Recovery Software use advanced scanning techniques to methodically scan entire hard drive and extract all lost files. They enable you to perform Do It Yourself File Recovery as they have self-explanatory and graphical user interface.

Data Recovery Software recover all types of lost, missing, and inaccessible files from Windows hard drive. The software supports recovery from FAT16, FAT32, VFAT, NTFS, and NTFS5 file system partitions of Windows 7, Vista, 2003, XP, and 2000.