Bootmgr missing, please help

swchang2

Honorable
Jan 23, 2013
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10,510
My problem is that windows 7 won't start on my computer, it keeps saying "bootmgr missing, press ctrl+alt+delete to restart" (this is not 100% word for word but it is what it means), here is a little background of what is going on:

So I bought a 500GB WD hard drive, the reason why I bought this new hard drive was because my dad's old computer (the one he gave me cause I needed one for school) did not come with one (he took his old hard drive cause it had his work in it). After that, I took just the my new drive to my friend's house to format the hard drive to NTFS format, and I made 3 partitions, 'x', 'y' and 'z', with 150GB, 150GB and 200GB respectively.

After that, I downloaded Windows7 from a microsoft sponsored website for free (because I am an engineering student at a university), and I am 100% certain that this website is good because I have downloaded from it before and it worked perfectly fine on my mac (I installed windows 7 on my mac using boot manager).

I installed windows7 to this new hard drive (partition 'x'), and everything went fine, set up computer name, copy some school files into the new drive.
Now here is the problem, when I take it home and try to run from my computer (with only this WD 500GB drive in it, it is the only one I got), it doesn't work, I googled some solutions and found out that I had to set one of the partitions as active, so I went back to my friend's house and set partition 'x' as active (the partition where I installed windows7, partition 'y' and 'z' are just to store files, maybe I'll install Linux in the near future).After that, I disconnected all of his hard drives with only mine left connected to the computer, nothing was changed in the Bios, when we try to boot up with only my hard drive in it, it says "bootmgr missing, press ctrl+alt+delete to restart", which makes absolutely no sense.
I connected his hard drive back, and once we boot the computer it asks us which windows to boot from, we selected mine and it boots up just fine.
I do not have the windows7 disk, I only have a downloaded file which is an .ISO image

Any help would be deeply appreciated.
 
Why would I install the Boot manager in his drive if I installed windows7 on my drive, I just went through his drive to format and partition my drive, and used his dvd drive to run the windows7 cd, I clicked the .ISO image and clearly told it to install in my 'x' drive.
 


yes but the bootmanager can be installed to drive 0 in some cases.


makesure you have a hidden partition that should have your boot partition on it.



idealy you would disconect all the hdd's except the ones going in final pc when setting it up. this way windows wont install bootloader to wrong drive
 
Make a Windows startup repair disc on your friends machine using his hard drive.
(Google to find out how to do this)
Then using your hard drive boot up with the Startup Repair disc and load up command prompt. Then follow the instructions on this site

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392#method1

Click "Show/hide information" underneath bootrec.exe options to get the exact commands for what you need to type into to fix your boot sectors. This should fix this problem.
 
Also @daeder, thank you very much for your suggestion but that program costs money, maybe I could torrent it but I am not familiar with torrenting files and also I heard it is very dangerous to do so cause of many virus.
 


put the windows install disk in your computer then you press i think it was f11 or something to get cmd open then you create a new mbr that way