Installing Laptop Recovery CD but usnig W7 pc as a hub?

H

Hitokiri Batohsai

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 22, 2003
Messages
429
Hi,

I am fixing an old Acer Asipire 5550 laptop-runing win xp. It has the recovery CD. I formatted the HD and placed it in and tried to recover using the CD. I get this message saying "bootmgr is missing".

This does not make sense since the CD should have worked. I did format the HD from FAT32 to NTFS, but I don't really think that is the issue here. Is there a way to use my W7 64bit desktop as a hub of some sort, so I install the software it to the laptop's HD? I doubt that it will work since it does not cure the bootmgr problem.

Thanks for the help.
 
So are you saying that you took the hard drive out of the laptop, placed it in another machine, used that machine to do the restore from the recovery CD, and then moved it back to the laptop? I'm kinda fuzzy on the specifics but that sounds like what you've attempted here.

If that's the case, it won't work because of how the boot loaders get recognized. Also, if you formatted a hard drive in another machine as FAT32 and then converted it to NTFS and then attempted to do the recovery, that's not going to work either. You'll get that "bootmgr is missing" error every time.

There is no reason to format the hard drive before you use the recovery CD - that CD will wipe everything off the hard drive, including the boot sector, bootmgr, all partitions, all data, etc - and recreate the information as it was when it left the factory (more or less). It takes care of all that process.

The only reason to do anything different (insert recovery CD, boot from that CD, let the recovery do its job) would be if the optical drive in the laptop was toast and didn't work anymore. A quick Google search shows me that laptop did/does have an optical drive internally so, unless it's defective or outright dead, then just follow that raw basic procedure:

Put the recovery CD in, boot off it, let it do the restore and that should get you operational again. If it doesn't, there's one last resort that might work. You'll need an actual XP CD, however, doesn't matter if it's OEM or Retail, Home or Pro, any of them will do.

Boot off the XP CD, when it gets to the options to choose from, choose the option for Recovery Console - not Repair Installation. You want the Recovery Console which lets you enter some commands at the command line which could potentially fix the bootmgr issue.

If you do this, when you get to command line, select the installation as required (usually just hit 1 and Enter which then takes you to the standard C: prompt) and then enter these commands in this order exactly:

fixmbr (then press Enter and wait for the command to execute and finish)

When it's done it should provide a message stating success. Then enter:

fixboot (then press Enter and wait, it might ask you to confirm something, press Y for yes and then Enter if necessary, wait for the command to execute and finish)

Those two commands, issued in that exact order, should bring that XP installation (after restore) to a bootable state without the CD.
 
I ran into a problem similar to this with a new HD and the FUCKING RETARDED Acer restore process.

The hard drive must be formated & marked as 'active'. The format tool will not work though unless the hard drive is marked active first, essentially forcing you to hook the drive up to another computer first.

Download Parted Magic desktop and use gparted application. There is an option to mark the disk as bootable or active or something like that. Then you should be able to boot to the 'format disc' then it will ask you to put in the system disc to reinstall the OS.

I was getting all sorts of errors similar to yours.
 
Wow, haven't seen that before, that's truly pooched of Acer to do that. Would be curious to know if that ends up being a workable solution for the OP however, never know when the phone will ring and a client asks me to do a restore on an Acer laptop they own. :)
 
What process is failing?

1. Booting from the CD to use the recovery software?
2. Already booted to the CD and recovered, now you can't boot from the HD?

If it's booting from the CD, then you'll need to hit some special key to open a boot menu, or set the CD to bootable in the BIOS. If the drivers are in AHCI mode, then you may not be able to boot from the CD. Not sure if this is all systems, but the few that I've worked with have had this "issue".

If you've recovered, and it's still not working, then you probably need to do as described above and make the disk active. The easiest way I could think of to do this is to boot from a Win7 CD and hit SHIFT+F10 at the first prompt. It should open a command prompt. You can then type 'diskpart' to open the Diskpart tool. At the prompt you would enter:

Code: 
Select Disk 0
Select Partition 1
Active

This will select the first partition of the first disk and make it active. Remove your win7 CD, cross your fingers, and reboot.
 
Bahamut said:
So are you saying that you took the hard drive out of the laptop, placed it in another machine, used that machine to do the restore from the recovery CD, and then moved it back to the laptop? I'm kinda fuzzy on the specifics but that sounds like what you've attempted here.

If that's the case, it won't work because of how the boot loaders get recognized. Also, if you formatted a hard drive in another machine as FAT32 and then converted it to NTFS and then attempted to do the recovery, that's not going to work either. You'll get that "bootmgr is missing" error every time.

There is no reason to format the hard drive before you use the recovery CD - that CD will wipe everything off the hard drive, including the boot sector, bootmgr, all partitions, all data, etc - and recreate the information as it was when it left the factory (more or less). It takes care of all that process.

The only reason to do anything different (insert recovery CD, boot from that CD, let the recovery do its job) would be if the optical drive in the laptop was toast and didn't work anymore. A quick Google search shows me that laptop did/does have an optical drive internally so, unless it's defective or outright dead, then just follow that raw basic procedure:

Put the recovery CD in, boot off it, let it do the restore and that should get you operational again. If it doesn't, there's one last resort that might work. You'll need an actual XP CD, however, doesn't matter if it's OEM or Retail, Home or Pro, any of them will do.

Boot off the XP CD, when it gets to the options to choose from, choose the option for Recovery Console - not Repair Installation. You want the Recovery Console which lets you enter some commands at the command line which could potentially fix the bootmgr issue.

If you do this, when you get to command line, select the installation as required (usually just hit 1 and Enter which then takes you to the standard C: prompt) and then enter these commands in this order exactly:

fixmbr (then press Enter and wait for the command to execute and finish)

When it's done it should provide a message stating success. Then enter:

fixboot (then press Enter and wait, it might ask you to confirm something, press Y for yes and then Enter if necessary, wait for the command to execute and finish)

Those two commands, issued in that exact order, should bring that XP installation (after restore) to a bootable state without the CD.
Click to expand...

I mounted it on my win7 pc and formatted the HD first before popping it back into the laptop. I also went and change the file system from FAT32 to NTFS. There is where I got this bootmgr missing notification every time I try to make a system restore. I think that the CD itself is flawed as I don't think that NTFS or not, it should not give that error message.

Either way, I have told my friend to go get me a win xp cd for his laptop.
 
So I was right on the money. :)

That won't work, for a variety of reasons that are tough to explain. But still the situation described by bigdogchris may pop up at a later time if you continue to use that recovery CD so... you're on the path to a working system once again and you should be ok now.

Hopefully.
 
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