Vista bootmgr non repaired cannot see windows

Szieve

Member
Ok, Old topic, as I've seen a few posts. I'm tryin to sift thru information here, but I figured it best to start my own thread.

Summary... My 73yr old Father did I don't know what to his pc.
MSg is bootmgr missing
I d/l the vista boot iso and burned.
Starts into vista repair counsole, but cannot find an install of windows.
tried the dos fix bootrec /fixboot & fixmbr. says complete, but still no joy.
there is a recovery partition.

Should I be trying the easybcd thing?
any help would be greatly appreciated.

I'm a pretty good part-time geek, but this one has me unhappily scratching my head.
 
Hello Szieve, welcome to NST.
Try hitting Next anyway at Startup Repair, though it doens't find any installations to repair. Sometimes the installation isn't visible until after you run Startup Repair (not before) at least one. Just make sure to disconnect any and all drives (excluding of course the drive Vista is installed to) you may have on the system, so Startup Repair doesn't get confused. Then, after the first time you run Startup Repair, there should now be a Vista installation showing up, but the boot problem may still not be fixed. So, go ahead, and run it two more times (since it can only fix one problem per pass), and that should resolve the issue.

Cheers.

Jake
 
Ok, so I had tried yesterday to repair and got the "needs to rename to longhorn" thing.. whatever..let it do its' business.. ok.. now... Windows cannot repair this installation.. /i can try and rebuild from scratch, but that seems a bit counter productive.. He paid <400 usd for the box.

My opinions at this point... give him a fresh format with XP (reg mod) Let him rebuild his own software. There is no critical data on the hd that I know of.. if there is any, I'll pull the drive and burn it to a cd for him first.

My only reservation is that all of the emachines drivers for this model are vista versions only. Will take some hunting to find correct ones. Probably should have gone with my gut in the first place and wiped the drive when he bought it and installed xp.

Thoughts? Opinions?
 
Yeah, a reinstall of XP may be best at this point. But, if the problem is XP is not booting (not Vista), then you can boot from the XP CD, get to the Recovery Console by pressing "R", and issue the following commands:
Code:
fixmbr
fixboot
That will put XP's bootloader back in charge of the boot (instead of Vista's), but has the downside affect of making Vista unbootable (if you have a dual-boot of Vista and XP), since XP's bootloader is not forward compatible.

Let me know how that goes, and if you have any more trouble.

Jake
 
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