Bootmgr woes

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
G

Guest

I have a 20GB harddrive on my primary IDE controller, and a 120GB harddrive
on my SATA controller. The former is reported by the BIOS as disk 0 (hence it
is the boot disk), while the latter contains my Vista installation.

Now, I managed to ruin my installation by converting both these disks to
dynamic disks in the Disk Management MMC. At first reboot, there was a boot
device failure. Fair enough, I tried the recovery option on the DVD - the
first time it didn't find any installations, but the second time it did. No
matter how many times I reran the fix, it didn't work. Into the console I
went, messed around with diskpart - wiped the IDE drive clean, made a new
primary partition and marked it active.

A bootrec /rebuildbcd finally succeeded, but a reboot yielded the message
"Bootmgr not found". The repair option on the DVD reports that it cannot
repair this automatically, and I can find no command line tool to manually
reinstall the bootmgr.

Any ideas? :-S
 
Thanks, but the thing is, Vista didn't start because the bootmgr file was
actually missing from the filesystem. :-S

I did, however, manage to get the system back up by using bcdedit to create
another store, and by manually copying the bootmgr file from the install DVD.
However, I will do a full system backup, wipe the disks, reinstall Vista and
restore the full system backup as I'm not convinced the startup system is up
to scratch. Who knows what magic stuff the install program does besides
chucking the bootmgr file into the root of the system drive, right?
 
Sounds like you did a pretty headsup repair Henri and you're familiar with
BCDEDIT for which there are a lot of resources on MSFT's site (if you do a
search I've put up about 15 linkes) and you were up with one of the Win RE
tools bootrec /rebuildbcd.

My experience with Startup Repair testing it for many months in several
builds is that when it works itworks well, and it's fast, and for some
reason System Restore from it will work for me when SR won't work from F8.

It also can be helpful in making major repairs, even when you aren't in a
"No Boot Vista situation"

What you are going to do is going to give you a stable clean slate.

CH.
 
This question is purely out of curiosity, and seeing as how you seem to have
some extensive experiece with the Startup Repair I thought maybe you know:
how come there is no tool to automatically restore every part of the startup
system to a working state?

It seems that all the tools are limited to manipulating the MBR and
partition tables, although bcdedit does restore the Boot\BCD file. If the
bootmgr file is actually missing from the disk and one is not very well
versed, one has no choice but to do a clean install. I would think that a
small commandline tool (at least), or maybe a component in Startup Repair, to
check if bootmgr exists and copy it over if it doesn't was not too
complicated to include. But then, I'm no Windows Engineer. ;-)
 
Henrikwl--

You asked how come ther eis no tool to automatically restore every part of
the startup to a working state. I believe that's the objective of startup
repair, although again it can be used in the context of broken Vista
components that are aside from a startup problem or the boot mechanisms.
I'm not sure that all the tools are limited to manipulating the MBR and
partition tables at all. How are you getting this info?

I think that the command line capability you're asking for when you ask for
someting to check to see if the bootmgr exists does exist among the switches
of BCDEDIT. Do a search for BCDEDIT on the technet Vista site
www.technet.microsoft.com/windowsvista or on this group or the general group
where I've listed as many resources as I could find for BCDEDIT when I did
the post.

Go to an eleavated command prompt and type in bcdedit /? and bcdedit.exe /?
explorer those switches. For example bcdedit.exe /? CREATESTORE.



Also is what you want included in these:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms791568.aspx

or

http://www.vistabootpro.org/

See additional Win RE tools here:

How to use the Bootrec.exe tool in the Windows Recovery Environment to
troubleshoot and repair startup issues in Windows Vista
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392/en-us

How to troubleshoot scenarios in which the rollback phase was unsuccessful
after you upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927523/en-us

After you install a device or update a driver for a device, Windows Vista
may not start
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927525/en-us

CH
 
This info is aquired through my own research into the matter.

The bcdedit.exe tool is striclty for manipulating the BCD store. BootRec.exe
fixes the MBR and the bootsector, scans all available harddisks for OSes to
add to the BCD store and optionally rebuilds the BCD store for you.
Bootsect.exe writes a NTLDR or bootmgr compatible boot sector according to
user's intent. But all of these tools expect that the file bootmgr exists on
the system drive, and either throw errors, silently fail or worse - succeed
without any indication that the problem might persist.

It's like in the olden days of XP - you could mess up your MBR, but an fdisk
/mbr would get you back up. You could delete your boot.ini, and there would
be tools to fix it. But if you actually deleted NTLDR, you basically had to
chuck it back in there manually.

It's not that this is a huge job, but it just seems to me to be so trivial a
thing to incorporate into all the other wonderful tools that make sure things
are done the Right Wayâ„¢. I'm assuming there is a reason why this feature
seems to be left out, as I'm certain Microsoft devs have considered this very
issue.

Either that, or the feature really is included and very well hidden. ;-)
 
Back
Top