NTLDR missing?? HELP ME PLEASE

Ok so this is my problem.
I was using my laptop monday. I shut it down when I left town. I came back from town today (thursday) and hit the power button to start up my laptop again, and upon restarting. NTLDR missing came up on the screen with press CTRL-ALT-DELETE to restart computer on a black screen. That was it, when i did the ctrl alt delete then it rebooted but the same thing happend.

I don't know why this all of a sudden happend. I only bought this laptop in september and have had little to no problems with it before this, i don't know why now it is doing this.

So i have followed all sorts of directions that i have found on this site, like get the XP cd and reboot from that but when i try to do a repair it asks for my administration password and what i thought was my password is not working. sooo now i can't get passed that part.

I don't want to lose all the information on this computer as it holds a lot of stuff from school. As luck would have it i was going to do the back up this weekend. GRRRRRRRRRRRR.

So now as it stands, i have no clue how to get my computer back up and running. I have been trying things here for about 3hrs and nothing is working. PLEASE HELP ME, i am just about at my wits end with this thing now. I don't understand why this happend.

Any help would be so greatly appreciated. Thanks again.
Cobie

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm

When you say what you thought was the password? Do you know the password or are you guessing?

This would be the password of the main administrator account. If no password was set just press Enter.



In a worse case scenario you can extract your data on a PC:

http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-1035_11-5160538.html#

oh i was totally guessing. I just typed in stuff i have for other passwords, i dont stray to far from my usuals b/c i am afraid i will forget, so maybe i didn't even set one.
i will check that none the less.
i didn't know i could just hit enter if i didn't have one.

i am hoping my computer is not dead and that i will have to resort to removing the harddrive. I mean it is not even a year old yet.

ok so i didn't have a password
so i copied files d:\i386\ntldr c:\
d:\i386\ntldetect.com c:\
and they were successful and the hints i have now say remove the CD from the computer and reboot but now the DAMN computer will not let me take the disk out. GRRRRRR
god this is so frustrating. I think i am getting farther ahead but still getting kicked in the ass.
So now what do i do??

I am stuck at the C:\windows>
Prompt, not really know how to proceed.

Are you saying that you cannot open the CD drive tray?

Is there a pin hole on the drive face? Usually inserting a pin here will open the drive tray manually.

fantastic, a new trick.
Ok so i have the cd out. is there a proper way to reboot the computer now since it is still at the c:\windows> Prompt??
Or can i just turn it off??

Turn it off and then back on and hopefully it will boot thru.

yep , it booted up. Thanks

Any idea, why this happened???

This is the most comprehensive page that I have seen on that particular error:

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm

But now that you mention it I will keep my eye out for any specific causes.

Glad you got it going! Thanks for the thanks!

now that i have seen that

4. Misconfiguration with the boot.ini file.
when the computer was booting up just then it was stopped for just a sec and said something about the boot.ini file. I thought it strange and was unsure if it was going to acutally boot up but it did.... thank god.

anyhoo, you guys are brilliant, i can always count on you to help me out. I am forever grateful.