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Today started off normally enough, with me sleeping in until eleven o'clock after intending to go to bed early but staying up to do some more of Crystal Towers. The problems began early, though, when I got up and turned on the computer.
NTLDR is missing.
"What the hell are you talking about?" I replied, slightly less polite to it than normal. That didn't seem to have any effect on it, and neither did pressing the Space bar repeatedly to restart. This was getting worrying - particularly as I had had a dream the previous night about a virus that wouldn't let you start your computer unless you removed Windows and replaced it with Linux. I remembered when my computer wouldn't turn on two weeks ago, and assumed that the problem was related to that - I decided to go away for a shower and open it up when I got back, reassuring myself that the NTLDR would be obviously disconnected from the CPU or the NTFSHDD or the YMCA or something.
When I returned, ready to open it up and operate on it, I noticed that I had left the USB adaptor driver disk in the floppy drive from yesterday when I was messing with that. Sensing that the solution was about to become embarrassingly obvious (and this story a bit anti-climactic) I removed it, tried again, and it started with no problems at all. And to think I made certain that my new computer would have a floppy drive when I got it a year ago.
But I still have to wonder - why it was decided to use that cryptic message to indicate that a disk had been left in the drive? Previous versions of DOS and Windows normally had "Non-system disk or disk error - Press any key to continue". A little frightening, yes, but at least it told you what the problem was and how to solve it. To keep up with Microsoft's new line of patronising error messages, even "A disk has been left in the drive - please remove it and I can start normally. Sorry for the inconvenience, would you like some tea?" surely wouldn't have taken up more than a few bytes more space in the OS to implement.
(I have now found out that NTLDR is short for "NT Loader" - knowing this would have made the solution a bit more obvious - and am reading about other, more terrifying, possible causes of the message. I'm backing up important files now.)
