"Bootmgr missing" on T43

[uh-oh]

I was having some troubles with my T43 HDD and decided it was time to replace the HDD. Got a new 80G drive, installed it and put Windows XP Pro back onto it no problems. Things worked well other than my having to reinstall all the things I added. Rather than do that I figured I would copy my drive using Norton Ghost. Seemed easy enough. So I took out the new drive, put the old one back in and began Norton's Drive Copy ...... onto the new drive. Stopped after 30 minutes. So I downloaded True Image...... but the computer went wonky before I could Image, went into self chkdsk, made repairs, and then rebooted only to show....... "BOOTMGR is missing, Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart."

This was a few weeks ago. I have been searching for ways to fix it without much success. I hoped I could get into the DOS emulator and do a BOOTFIX but haven't been able to. Not even sure if that would be the way to go. I am not super technical but from what I was reading it seemd to be something to try.

Hoping people here can help me with this problem.

So far I have tried:
- the VISTA Recovery CD (as expected, nothing corrected)
- Seatools for DOS - found 12 bad sectors on the old HDD but since it isn't Seagate won't do anything to help)
- downloaded and tried Master boot record repair kit from LENOVO with no result

[Harryc]

What manufacturer/model is the old drive?

[arlab]

Try this How to reenable the F11 function (Product Recovery Program).

Also, check this post (of that thread): http://thinkpads.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... 18#p476061

[Stargate199]

Its Windows XP right that has its boot manager missing? Here's what to do. You will need a Windows XP CD, no recovery CDs will work unless you can boot into the recovery console. Boot to the XP cd and when you get the blue install screen, wait for everything to load, then a menu will appear. One of those options is "Press R for Recovery Console". Select that options and you will be presented with a DOS prompt and it will ask for a password. enter you Windows password and then type the following commands.

Code: Select all

fix boot
fix mbr

The boot manager should now be restored and XP should boot up.

The Vista disk will do nothing because Vista uses a different boot manager than XP, and since the XP entry is gone, Vista will not see it.

[K0LO]

The message "BOOTMGR is missing" comes from the boot sector of a partition that was formatted by Vista. If it were coming from a partition formatted by XP the message would be "NTLDR is missing".

Repairing the MBR is unnecessary (fixmbr) because your PC is obviously attempting to boot from one of the partitions, so the MBR has already done its job correctly. However, you could also be attempting to boot the wrong partition, so make sure that the XP partition is set as "Active".

If the XP partition is correctly set as Active and you are getting the Vista message "BOOTMGR is missing..." then you need to repair the boot sector for booting XP-style. One way to do this is to boot from a Vista DVD and go to the manual repair screen, which opens a command prompt window. Do not use the automatic repair. Once you have a command prompt then type "C: <enter>", then "dir" to list the contents of the partition with drive letter C. Do the same for D:, E:, etc until you can figure out which drive letter belongs to your XP partition. Let's assume that you find it to be C:.

Then issue the following command:

Code: Select all

bootsect /nt52 C:

Replace C: by the correct drive letter if different. This command will re-write the boot sector so that the partition will boot Windows XP. Another way to do this is to boot from a Windows XP CD and enter the recovery console. Issue the command:

Code: Select all

fixboot

[Marin85]

Did you have more than one partition (incl. the hidden one from IBM/Lenovo) to clone? If so, the MBR or the bootmanager or the partition table or altogether may not have installed properly (XP seems to like making such problems with more partitions available).

[uh-oh]

As luck would have it, after posting in the forums my laptop decided it would let me through without the "bootmgr missing" error. No idea why it suddenly happened. It got past the "bootmgr missing" part only to reach the page where I choose how to start up, in safe mode or normal mode. With any choice I made the computer didn't progress. Aside from the HDD having some problems I think that the crash or chkdsk repair that followed threw Windows even more out of whack. So now I have a new problem.

[K0LO]

In your original post you mentioned that SeaTools for DOS found 12 bad sectors on the old disk. Any chance that bad information in these sectors got transferred to the new disk?

If the old disk is still available then you could try running chkdsk /r on it to find and mark the bad sectors. Then repeat your transfer process.

[killer]

Lenovo support told me that chkdsk is not good enough and that I should use PC Doctor disk checker. Maybe they know something I don't or maybe they are mistaken.
Anyway, it won't hurt to use PC Doctor and see what it says.