BOOTMGR Problem

[Brian Gladman]

I have been running Windows Vista Ultimate x64 on a dual core Athlon
without problems for months. But on booting today I got the dreaded
'BOOTMGR is missing' message during the boot sequence (this was after I
had miistakenly clicked on 'sleep' rather than 'shutdown', which seems
to have damaged something).

I have followed all the options for solving this problem (all three
steps as set out in the Microsoft KB article on the issue) but the
problem reamins stubbornly in place.

But I have discovered by accident that if I leave my x64 Vista disc in
the DVD drive and allow the 'press any key to boot from DVD' prompt to
time out (i.e. without a key press) my system then boots up normally.

I am pretty well resigned to doing a clean reinstall but I thought I
would ask here about the issue in the hope someone might know from the
symptoms what is going wrong and how to fix it.

I would be most grateful for any advice that anyone can offer.

I would hate to spend hours going through a reinstall (and reloading
megabytes of Windows updates) if there is a simple fix.

Brian Gladman

 

[koze]

I have been running Windows Vista Ultimate x64 on a dual core Athlon
without problems for months. But on booting today I got the dreaded
'BOOTMGR is missing' message during the boot sequence (this was after I
had miistakenly clicked on 'sleep' rather than 'shutdown', which seems
to have damaged something).

I have followed all the options for solving this problem (all three
steps as set out in the Microsoft KB article on the issue) but the
problem reamins stubbornly in place.

But I have discovered by accident that if I leave my x64 Vista disc in
the DVD drive and allow the 'press any key to boot from DVD' prompt to
time out (i.e. without a key press) my system then boots up normally.

I am pretty well resigned to doing a clean reinstall but I thought I
would ask here about the issue in the hope someone might know from the
symptoms what is going wrong and how to fix it.

I would be most grateful for any advice that anyone can offer.

I would hate to spend hours going through a reinstall (and reloading
megabytes of Windows updates) if there is a simple fix.

Brian Gladman

You should be able to boot from the DVD and do a start up repair.

Ko.

 

[Brian Gladman]

You should be able to boot from the DVD and do a start up repair.

Thanks for the thought but I have tried this and it doesn't find any
errors to repair! I have also tried rebuilding the boot record using
bcdedit but nothing seems to work.

Brian

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

Set your computer to boot from DVD (using the Boot setting in the BIOS),
insert the disc and restart. Vista will prompt you for language and keyboard
layout options, then ask if you want to reinstall Vista or repair your installation.
You want Repair.

How to fix "BOOTMGR is missing" in Windows Vista
http://cyberst0rm.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-to-fix-bootmgr-is-missing-in.html

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows Shell/User

---------------------------------------------------------------

I have been running Windows Vista Ultimate x64 on a dual core Athlon
without problems for months. But on booting today I got the dreaded
'BOOTMGR is missing' message during the boot sequence (this was after I
had miistakenly clicked on 'sleep' rather than 'shutdown', which seems
to have damaged something).

I have followed all the options for solving this problem (all three
steps as set out in the Microsoft KB article on the issue) but the
problem reamins stubbornly in place.

But I have discovered by accident that if I leave my x64 Vista disc in
the DVD drive and allow the 'press any key to boot from DVD' prompt to
time out (i.e. without a key press) my system then boots up normally.

I am pretty well resigned to doing a clean reinstall but I thought I
would ask here about the issue in the hope someone might know from the
symptoms what is going wrong and how to fix it.

I would be most grateful for any advice that anyone can offer.

I would hate to spend hours going through a reinstall (and reloading
megabytes of Windows updates) if there is a simple fix.

Brian Gladman

 

[AJR]

Brian - At times there is a little "qurick" to the Start-up Repair option in
that it may not detect a problem on the inital run.. Run the repair option
several times.

 

[Brian Gladman]

Set your computer to boot from DVD (using the Boot setting in the BIOS),
insert the disc and restart. Vista will prompt you for language and keyboard
layout options, then ask if you want to reinstall Vista or repair your installation.
You want Repair.

How to fix "BOOTMGR is missing" in Windows Vista
http://cyberst0rm.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-to-fix-bootmgr-is-missing-in.html

Thanks for the suggestion but I have tried all of this and it hasn't
made any difference I am afraid. It looks like I am in for a full
re-install :-(

Brian

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

If you are able to boot into Vista, then download
and install VistaBootPro:
http://www.vistabootpro.org/

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows Shell/User

---------------------------------------------------------------

:

Thanks for the suggestion but I have tried all of this and it hasn't
made any difference I am afraid. It looks like I am in for a full
re-install :-(

Brian

 

[andy]

Do you have more than one physical disk drive in the computer? Sounds
like the BIOS is booting the wrong disk.

I have been running Windows Vista Ultimate x64 on a dual core Athlon
without problems for months. But on booting today I got the dreaded
'BOOTMGR is missing' message during the boot sequence (this was after I
had miistakenly clicked on 'sleep' rather than 'shutdown', which seems
to have damaged something).

I have followed all the options for solving this problem (all three
steps as set out in the Microsoft KB article on the issue) but the
problem reamins stubbornly in place.

But I have discovered by accident that if I leave my x64 Vista disc in
the DVD drive and allow the 'press any key to boot from DVD' prompt to
time out (i.e. without a key press) my system then boots up normally.

From this I would draw the following conclusions:
1. motherboard bios does not enumerate the hard disks properly
2. vista system partition (the one containing bootmgr) is located on
the "first" connected disk
3. the disk the bios is set to boot does not contain the system
partition.

 

[Brian Gladman]

Do you have more than one physical disk drive in the computer? Sounds
like the BIOS is booting the wrong disk.

My thanks to all who responded - I really appreciate your rapid efforts
to help out.

It looks like it is a multiple disc problem as you guesssed Andy. I have
two hard drives and it boots up normally when I disable the second one.
I will now have to work out how to stop it doing this if I am to get my
second drive back!

Thanks again Andy for pointing me in the right direction. I have two
SATA drives and I would have thought it was booting off the primary but
if you are right it is booting of the secondary.

Brian

 

[koze]

My thanks to all who responded - I really appreciate your rapid efforts
to help out.

It looks like it is a multiple disc problem as you guesssed Andy. I have
two hard drives and it boots up normally when I disable the second one.
I will now have to work out how to stop it doing this if I am to get my
second drive back!

Thanks again Andy for pointing me in the right direction. I have two
SATA drives and I would have thought it was booting off the primary but
if you are right it is booting of the secondary.

Brian

Then just change the connectors from the first and second disk.
Ko.

 

[Brian Gladman]

Then just change the connectors from the first and second disk.
Ko.

Thanks for the thought but I have now solved it another way.

My thanks to Andy for his on-line fault diagnosis!

The problem turned out to be some form of corruption of the BIOS data.
Althouugh the disc boot order appeared to be correct in the BIOS setup,
setting it deliberately wrong and then resetting it correctly solved the
problem.

My thanks to everyone for their efforts to help out.

Brian

 

[koze]

Thanks for the thought but I have now solved it another way.

My thanks to Andy for his on-line fault diagnosis!

The problem turned out to be some form of corruption of the BIOS data.
Althouugh the disc boot order appeared to be correct in the BIOS setup,
setting it deliberately wrong and then resetting it correctly solved the
problem.

My thanks to everyone for their efforts to help out.

Brian

Thanks for telling, advice then check your Cmos battery also ! could be
low on power.

Ko