Hey I recently sent my dell XPS off to get the screen fixed on it. Before I sent it I started to reformat it. But when I get it back and try to boot it, it says NTLDR is missing. Press any Key to Restart. So i put in the windows vista disk to put a operating system on it. I get to where I select a partition. When I select a partition it says that the partition doesnt have NTFS or something like that? I was just wondering if anyone knew what any of this meant. Thanks

Try pressing "R" for recovery console and wait until the DOS prompt comes.
Then type:
fixmbr
fixboot c:

Reboot, and pray. Or, pray and reboot, whichever.

When should I press R???

During which part of the process?

When the CD asks you whether to install or start the (R)ecovery console.

One likely cause of the problem you see is the master boot record being broken for some reason (most likely malware, but other reasons are possible).

With some luck, that's all what's broken, and you can restore your system without losing everything that way, in 3 minutes. If you are not lucky... well... pretty much anything might be broken then (from corrupted partition tables to a total failure of the disk, or anything you can imagine).
You can still try to format the disk and install a new system if all restore attempts failed, but I would in any case try everything first.

If you have important data on that computer that you cannot afford to lose (no backup, eh) I would give SystemRescueCd a try too, if restoring the MBR fails.
There are tools on that one which are not precisely self-explaining (you'll have to dig through documentation first), but you can often still rescue most of your data even when half of the hard drive is f*cked up, and it's often better to spend 2 hours on that than lose all data.

If you interrupted it during a reformat, then it will not have finished writing out the file system tables. Which means the NTFS partition will be corrupted.

Unless what you're trying to say is that you started to "reinstall" vista without a "format".

In the latter case, when attempting to reinstall vista, first go to repair (before clicking install), command prompt, and see if you can access the filesystem.

I could go to repair, but then it asked a bunch of files that I would possibly look into? I dont know i'm really confused on the matter. I'm trying to just completely wipe out everything and just reinstall vista on it. I inserted a dell media direct 3.0 cd and it seemed to get rid of the NTLDR is missing error.

Now I'm going to retry installing windows and see if it comes up again.

well i got the operating system on it now but a bunch of drivers are missing, including the ethernet controller, so now I cant even go onto the interenet and download them all.. Is there any way to put a driver on a flashdrive and then put it on my computer?

I tried but i cant seem to get it to work.

Well, try harder. Unzipping them would probably help. As would getting them from your manufacturers website.

This isn't a technical support website.

Yes, you can flash drive them. Since it is a Dell, grab the service tag and go to Dell's site. Plug in the service tag and your OS and it will give you a list of all the drivers that came installed on your computer. Just reinstall them. Although you should have a disk with those. But yes, just download them to a flash drive and reinstall them.

Yeah Dragon I figured it out. I was trying to do it from a bad website. once I tried the dell website worked right away. Thanks a bunch.

And washu I understand that its not a technical support website, but its a forum where people ask questions.

Thanks to all for the help!