December 5, 2009 - kenshinjeff

bootmgr is missing windows 7

This is a freaking big annoyance. If you install windows 7 with more than one harddisk, it will automatically make the 2nd harddisk some kind of backup directory which windows refuses to format. Yeah sure, it’s a great add in, but really irritating when you decide to plug out that drive. I really wanted to format it and so I fdisked it on an ubuntu iso.

Then when I tried to boot back to windows, I was presented with the alimighty black screen which says bootmgr is missing, press ctrl alt del.

  1. Disconnect all your drives, leave the harddrive with windows 7 intact.
  2. Boot off windows 7 bootdisk, select “repair your computer” after selecting time/date.
  3. You now have 3 possible ways, from easy to most difficult, if the first doesn’t work, try the second, then the third, if all else fails, re-install.
  • Option A: Let windows repair the BCD
  • Option B: Manually rebuild the BCD via recovery console
  • Option C: Delete offending BCD dir, rebuild BCD manually, make the windows 7 partition the active partition, let windows repair the BCD for you, then reboot.

It took me a few hours of my life, and I found the solution here. Considering that a windows 7 installation takes only 15 mins on my comp, I hope this will take you less than 15 mins to fix.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/itprovistasetup/thread/e6e2399c-746a-4d45-8b77-dc6e89fd9409

annoyances / HOW-TOS / really cool geeky stuff

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