bootmgr is missing - I'm f'ed in the b huh?

Shegokigo · Oct 13, 2011

Got this error this morning when turning on my system at home before heading to work. Some quick research tells me that all I have to do is insert my Win7 disc and hit "repair"...... except that my Win7 disc is 4hrs away in a storage unit.

Am I going to have to drop $200 on a full copy or can I spend $120 on an upgrade? Do I have any other options if I don't have a win7 disc? The only other bit of assistance I have is a laptop, but that's running WinXP (to which I also don't have a disc) and it doesn't have a DVD burner in it.

What say you, techies of Halforums?

Hylian · Oct 13, 2011

If you can find a way to burn a disc this should fix you up. If you can't burn it to a disc I believe (but i am not sure) that you can put it on a flash drive and boot it up from there but you would need to make the flash drive bootable.

http://neosmart.net/blog/2009/windows-7-system-repair-discs/

Shegokigo · Oct 13, 2011

Interesting, I could use the laptop to download that and put it on my flash drive. As for making it "bootable" that's just a matter of formating it and setting my desktop to boot from the usb?

Shakey · Oct 13, 2011

Here's how to make a bootable win 7 flash drive from an iso. Not sure if it'll work with the repair disks linked above, but if you can get a hold of a win7 iso it's all you need.

Shegokigo · Oct 13, 2011

So if I can "aquire" a Win7 Iso of my current desktop OS then I can use that to create a win7 boot flash drive to fix this little issue?

Shakey · Oct 13, 2011

Shegokigo · Oct 13, 2011

Well then, all's fine and right with the world. I'll be attempting all of this soon as I get home.

My thanks to Shakey, Tin (for trying) and Hylian for the help.

Jay · Oct 13, 2011

Shegokigo said:
Got this error this morning when turning on my system...blah blah

Shegokigo · Oct 13, 2011

It's like you're trying to insinuate something but just didn't post enough to get the point across

Shakey · Oct 13, 2011

If this came out of nowhere, you may want to run scan disk. Your hard drive could be starting to crap out.

Shegokigo · Oct 13, 2011

Well last night I fiddled around with the back of my system to plug in my psp to the usb. It wasn't a pretty sight as the back of my system is neigh unreachable, so I could have been banging around back there for a while. Then I did use my psp's hard drive for a while, moving files back and forth.

Not sure if any of that could cause the issue, but that's all I did that was different from normal.

I do have two drives in there at the moment though. One older 7200 I use for extra HD space and a Raptor Drive that I use for gaming/OS. Raptor is about 2yrs old, 7200 is probably pushing 4.

Shakey · Oct 13, 2011

I'd run a check disk before repairing, just to make sure. Here's a write up on doing it from the install cd. http://kb.wisc.edu/page.php?id=6565

Shegokigo · Oct 13, 2011

I'm guessing I could do a check disk off an Install Flash Drive as well?

Shakey · Oct 13, 2011

Yeah, the install flash drive you'll make will work exactly the same as an install cd.

Shegokigo · Oct 13, 2011

Crossing my fingers then, cause that data drive is loaded.... I doubt the issue would be with my Raptor but the thought of either being defunct is not a pretty thought.

Shakey · Oct 13, 2011

I've had hard drives go bad after a couple weeks, a couple years wouldn't surprise me at all. The boot manager would be on your Raptor, so if it's a hard drive problem that would be the one.

GasBandit · Oct 13, 2011

The Tao of hard drives is all data is transient. Yearn not for vast stores of things you can't just retorrent again if you lose them, for all digital pleasures are fleeing and your drive will F you in the A when it is least convenient for you. It is as inevitable as the sunrise.

Or, build a cheap windows home server and make a drive pool with data redundancy. In which case, never mind.

Shegokigo · Oct 13, 2011

Got home, tried turning it on again. Same error.

Went into BIOS, switched my boot sequence up to second hard drive. It boots and I'm in.

Uhhhh? Ok?

Shegokigo · Oct 13, 2011

I have no idea whether I should be relieved or worried further....

PatrThom · Oct 13, 2011

Great time to back up your data, tho.

--Patrick

Shegokigo · Oct 14, 2011

Looks like I'm finally going to have a reason to grab one of those cheap 2TB external HDs now. Any recommendations under $100?

GasBandit · Oct 14, 2011

I've actually had best results with a regular INTERNAL sata drive in a $15 rosewill enclosure. But it's up to you.

strawman · Oct 14, 2011

Shegokigo said:
Looks like I'm finally going to have a reason to grab one of those cheap 2TB external HDs now. Any recommendations under $100?

Spend $20 more and get a 3TB drive:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145561
http://www.amazon.com/Hitachi-Desks...A882/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1318622207&sr=8-3

Then buy two.

And learn to use and love RAID.

Also buy a 64GB SSD and put your OS, programs, and swap file on that, and data on the bigger drives.

And back everything up frequently. Backblaze is only $5/month for unlimited space, although they don't backup files larger than 4GB last time I checked. On a yearly basis that's cheaper than a new hard drive each year, and certainly worth it. There are, of course, competing services with similar pricing.

Shegokigo · Oct 14, 2011

Thank you Steinman, however that post made my head hurt and my brain have a minor annurism....

strawman · Oct 14, 2011

My work here is done.

wooosh!

PatrThom · Oct 15, 2011

Careful about those >2TB drives. 32-bit OSes have trouble with them.

Plenty of companies out there making turnkey external RAID 1/5 arrays (NewerTech, Drobo, G-Tech) and other, more exotic solutions.

--Patrick

Shegokigo · Oct 15, 2011

64bit OS here, so far so good?

Again, "RAID" and all the rest Stein said pretty much went over my head.

strawman · Oct 15, 2011

RAID is a method of making several drives look like one drive. One configuration allows you to hook up two drives in a "mirror" so that the drives contain the exact same data. When one fails, you replace it and your data is never lost, and the computer never stops working. This configuration also doubles read speed as long as both drives are working (write speed is unaffected).

Other configurations allow greater speed, certain types of error correction, and just chaining a bunch of drives together to make a single large disk.

Most motherboards include RAID these days, so it usually just means buying an extra drive, setting them up in a BIOS style setup screen, installing the drivers, and telling windows that you're running RAID.

It's not bad, but it can seem daunting to those who haven't dealt with it before.

Shegokigo · Oct 15, 2011

I thought by having my gaming and OS programs on my Raptor drive and keeping everythingelse on my slower storage drive was the same kind of thing?

PatrThom · Oct 15, 2011

Nope.

What you're doing is optimal for keeping down "bus contention" (i.e., when two things compete for the same drive/bandwidth, etc). The computer still sees them as discrete drives.

The point of using RAID technology is to take a bunch of individual drives and make the computer treat them as one single drive with either several times the speed or several times the reliability (or both, depending on how complex you want to get).

--Patrick

Shegokigo · Oct 15, 2011

Bleh, here I was thinking I was being crafty.

strawman · Oct 15, 2011

What you're doing is good and crafty.

PatrThom · Oct 16, 2011

Yes. It makes your computer faster. It just doesn't make it any more secure.

--Patrick

That Tech Guy · Oct 24, 2011

It looks like you already fixed your own problem, but I wanted to say, make sure your bios didn't get reset by a power bump. I've had it happen a few times with loose power cords that bump everything back to default. I was just gonna say make sure your boot setup is proper. Maybe change the bios battery (SAVE SETTINGS FIRST!) too.

PatrThom · Oct 24, 2011

That Tech Guy said:
Maybe change the bios battery (SAVE SETTINGS FIRST!) too.

And by "SAVE SETTINGS FIRST" that means "write them all down on a piece of paper or something," since pulling the CMOS battery pretty much wipes everything clean that didn't come with the BIOS in the first place.

--Patrick