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Changed primary boot drive, nonfunctioning PC


Miek
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My roommate was messing around with partitions (he had two and was trying to merge them into one large partition) on his PC's hard drive and changed his primary boot directory. Now, whenever he starts up his computer, his gets the message, "bootmgr is missing. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart." He can't get any further than that. Neither him nor I can figure out how to set the primary directory back to what it was because he can't get into Windows at all. He's using Windows 7 Ultimate x86. In the BIOS, there's only one hard drive listed, and it's already set as the primary boot device. His disc drive doesn't work. I'm not sure what to do at this point in time.

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You may need to connect the HDD to another computer and copy/paste a bootmgr file to the location where the BIOS is looking for it. You might also be able to do it if you had a bootable OS on a flash drive.

Edited by Phil

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  • 1 month later...

easy as pie!

 

 

if you have another computer handy download a win7 repair disc.

 

 

select cd/dvd from the boot menu

 

 

when the repair options come up, choose command prompt

 

 

type:

 

 

bootrec.exe /fixmbr

 

 

if you need a new boot sector

 

bootrec.exe /fixboot

 

 

 

that should do it,

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yep, you can't really get safer than that.

 

alternatively, if you still cant get yourself to do it the fixmbr or fixboot method

 

 

you can run a live linux cd , ubuntu or whatever

 

install grub bootloader to mbr

 

boot into windows

 

install easybcd

 

write windows7/vista bootloader to mbr

 

 

 

that would be a much longer way to do it but either way works.

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