I have an HP Notebook 2000 running Windows 7 64-bit. I wanted to make a new partition for Windows 8 using Disk Manager in Windows 7 and I couldn't get more than 18 GB volume shrink size, so I stupidly deleted the partition "HP Recovery" thinking it was useless. Now when I boot up my laptop, I get a message saying "NTLDR is missing Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". I can't access System Recovery. When booting up my laptop, the only option I get before the NTLDR error message is ESC for Startup Menu. In the startup menu, my options are:

---
F1 System Information
F2 System Diagnostics
F9 Boot Device Options
F10 BIOS Setup
F11 System Recovery



ENTER - Continue Startup

For more information, please visit: www.hp.com\go\techcenter\startup
---
Choosing any of those options makes my laptop freeze, except for BIOS Setup. Pressing F11 while booting laptop makes it freeze as well. Is there anything I can do here? Can I boot off of a recovery disk? I can get on my brother's computer and make a recovery disk if that will work. I can boot the Windows 8 installation off my USB, and there's an option to repair my computer. I can Refresh PC. When I choose to do that, it says "The drive where Windows is installed is locked. Unlock the drive and try again". I can also choose "Reset your PC" but when I do so, it says "Unable to reset your PC. A required drive partition is missing." Then there's "Advanced options" and so I tried "System Restore", and got the error "To use System Restore, you must specify which Windows installation to restore.

Restart this computer, select an operating system, and then select System Restore."

Would booting a Windows 7 installation disk work? I've also seen software that restores deleted partitions. I can't use the software because I can't boot into an OS. Does that kind of software exist as a bootup program? Like can I put it on a USB or DVD and boot it when I start my laptop? Please help.

Yep, try to boot from an install disk. MAKE SURE that you change the boot order to the cd disk drive first.

Thanks for the reply.

Will it work off of a USB drive instead of a disk if I burned a Win 7 trial ISO onto USB?

Nope. You have to make a USB backup with the tool inside of windows for that.

I did it anyways after I replied and it worked and I can run Windows but I don't have any drivers so I downloaded all the drivers I need but I installed them and they didn't do anything. So I can't connect to internet (even though I installed a driver for that :/) so now my goal is to get the recovery partition back. Can you help me with that? If I can do it, all problems will be solved and I can do a system recovery. I downloaded EaseUS Partition Recovery install exe on my phone and copied it onto my laptop and I am currently searching for lost partitions. If this doesn't work out, is there software that can install a recovery partition? Or if not are you aware of a way I can get a recovery partition?

I just deleted it and that's all. Partition Recovery is about halfway done searching and the recovery partition hasn't been found yet.

I installed that program and when I search for deleted volumes it doesn't find any. So I chose to scan completely and again it didn't find any volumes. EaseUS is a little more than 3/4 done searching and still no recovery partition found. All it's finding are "Boot" and "EFISECTOR" partitions. :/

It's done and found the Recovery partition. The bad thing is that when I try to check it, it says "The partition cannot be undeleted because it will overwrite the existing system or boot partition and make the system unbootable." The only reason why I can think it's saying that is because the recovery partition was drive letter D: before I deleted it and right now I have a failed Windows 8 install in D:. Should I delete my D: partition? Meanwhile I'm going to google the error message.

I have 4 Hard Disk Drives by the way. There's Local Disk C:, Local Disk D:, SYSTEM E:, and HP_TOOLS F:. I tried deleting D: in Disk Management but it says "Windows cannot delete the active system partition on this disk", though I'm quite sure it's not being used right now. I can delete SYSTEM and HP_TOOLS. Deleting one of them seems out of the question though.

Okay, I have deleted D: partition and recovered the Recovery partition. All of the startup options work except for System Recovery. It freezes when I try loading System Recovery. Do you know what I can do about this? I went into Advanced Boot Menu with F8 and chose "Repair Your Computer" and got a blue screen after Windows finished loading files.

Yeah it's back.

I'm on Windows 8 right now so that's why it's C: drive. E: is Windows 7, I think it turns to C: when I boot Windows 7.