I got a wreck of a laptop from my friend, and he says he wants nothing of it. It has a 2.8P4 processor, half a gig of ram, and he's offered me the hard drive for $20. I need to fix this thing up.

Here's the problem, though. Whenever I boot it, I get the "NTLDR is Missing." error. I need to find a way around this. I was hoping to run OpenSuSE on this thing and call it a day, but I have to idea if it will boot from CD.

Yeah the NDLDR might be a smoked HD or just some fucked up partitioning. What I would do is go into the BIOS and set it to boot to CD and then you should be good to go.