boot manager failed to find OS loader

[pancake]

So, yeah. My brother and I, non-technological wizards that we are, thought that installing Alcohol 120% would be a wise and smart move since we wanted to burn things.

Turns out this was not so wise, because the moment he clicked "Finish Installation", Vista promptly committed suicide and we were notified by the Recovery function (Fix Start-Up Issues) that the problem lay with "boot manager failed to find OS loader".

Not ones to be knocked down by such a simple problem, we booted our XP machine (from which I write now), googled to find this part of this website and followed the instructions from 1 to 4.

The good news is that the Recovery Function no longer reports that the boot manager failed to find os loader.

The bad news is that, instead, it cites as root problem:

"Unknown bugcheck: bugcheck 7e. Parameters=0x0000005, 0x824908e2, 0x9b0eea68, 0x9b0ee764"

Sadly, as the computer was Dell-bought and, as such, does not come with convenient re-installation software, we are in a kind of a mess.

We have already held a funeral service for the data on the harddisks, as we no longer expect to recover them. However, we're at a loss at what to do with our present predicament.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

 

[Terry60]

Hi Pancake, welcome to NST.
We've had a few people come here in the past, with the same problem.
If you've downloaded a copy of the recovery disk, as I assume from your link you have, then boot it, but after the "repair your computer", don't "startup repair", but use the system restore function to take Vista back before you installed Alcohol 120%.
When system restore backs out the bad install, get yourself a free copy of Imgburn. It's what we recommend for burning our ISO files (we know it works, whereas other burning software can be variable, or like Vista, just not do ISOs at all). Even Microsoft recommends Imgburn to burn the Windows 7 Public Beta ISO.
If you are not of a cautious disposition, and you do not have system restore enabled, post back and we'll advise how to rescue your personal data before resorting to a Dell factory reset.

 

[pancake]

We've had a few people come here in the past, with the same problem.

Yes, I'm aware of that. I browsed the forums first to see if I could find a readily-available solution to the predicament, but I fear it is a 'no-go' situation.

If you are not of a cautious disposition, and you do not have system restore enabled, post back and we'll advise how to rescue your personal data before resorting to a Dell factory reset.

System Restore has been attempted, but unfortunately it has not alleviated the problem. If anything, we can now no longer access the Recovery tools; it displays the Vista background, and while interesting to stare at it got boring after two minutes.

I am not quite sure where we went wrong, if at all. Thanks for the attempted help, but I presume that, short of notifying Dell or the sales company of this error, there is very little we can do if the system refuses to access the Recovery tools? We've attempted startups in safe-mode and all that shabang in order to get to the command prompt, but no go.

 

[Terry60]

Which system recovery are you trying ? The Dell built-in partition, or our disk.
You should be able to access system recovery from the latter.
The Dell recovery seems to have a modified boot manager, which you might have clobbered by running the standard Vista boot repair before attempting the system restore.
If you can system restore from our disk, you should be back with a running Vista, but no way of booting to the Dell partition.
However if Vista is running, you should be able to access the Dell recovery directly from Windows, and hopefully it will have an option there to repair the Dell boot.
If all else fails, and you need to go to Dell for replacement media, you can still rescue your personal data first by downloading a bootable live Linux distro (like Ubuntu 8.10) which you can use to access the HDD and copy your data off to external storage.