dolari | I've seen Hard Drives go bad, but this one went spectacularly bad.

P: Will not boot to windows. NTLDR missing.
D:DSN#9917386. SVCTAG:BLLLL01. SYMPTOM:Windows
2000
Startup Problems. LOG: Searched all vendor
knowledge bases for all error messages that are
received. Checked to see if a disk is already in
the floppy disk drive. Obtained the error message
at boot. Error Message: NTLDR is missing...
Flashed the BIOS. Created a Windows 2000 Boot
Disk (System gave a 0x0000007B "Non accessable
Boot Device" error loading). Performed a
customized repair installation of Windows 2000
per MS KB Q318728 **DSN3 System saw partition on
system as damaged. Removed partition and
reinstalled partition. System formatted and
copied files, but on reboot, system refused to
continue loading and hung after post with no
error. Reran Windows setup program, and this
time 4 partitions showed up (1 Unpartitioned space
82351MB, 2 Unpartitioned space 24158MB, 3 is
UNKNOWN C: 831050MB 4 is \\UNKNOWN 265613).
System will not remove 2 unpartitioned
"partitions." Ran 90/90. Diagnostics failed
with "Bad Command or Device." Sending
replacement Hard Drive. Customer requests blank
drive. Customer requests parts only service.
S:S: Sending replacement Hard Drive.

For the non techies among us, this basically means her machine wouldn't boot up to Windows. So we tried to fool it into rebooting, and it wouldn't. So we tried to reinstall it, and it said the drive was bad. So we RE-Tried to reinstall it...this time it said there were 4 bad drives...and 2 of those drives didn't exist. So we tried to run the diagnostics to determine WHAT was bad on the hard drive...and the diags said "No Hard Drive here!"

She got a new drive. :)