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I have a Dell 1210 laptop that was dual booting Vista (80Gig Primary Partition) with XP (20Gig partition). I recently used GParted to try and shrink the Vista Partition size and increase the XP partition size, since I need more XP space and rarely use Vista. While running the GParted shrink on the Vista partition overnight, I experienced a power outage, and the laptop died while the shrink was still processing. This effectively ruined my Vista Partition.

Now I wanted to just get the computer back to a working condition, so I plugged the laptop into my UPS, destroyed the Primary partition that stored Vista, and grew the XP partition to control the entire disk (100Gig). I also set the boot flag to enabled from GParted.

When I attempt to boot the machine, I get: BOOTMGR is missing Press Cntl+Alt+Delete to restart.

I Googled this, and tried to run XP recovery mode and use the "FIXMBR" Command, but that did not work, as I still get the same error message upon reboot.

How can I restore the MBR/Boot Loader on this Laptop and continue to run off of the XP partition?

I have no Vista disk, but I do have an XP disk.

Thank you in advance for any help.

4 Answers 4

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The boot sector is probably damaged too. Follow these instructions:

  1. Load Your Windows Vista CD. Select the system to repair
  2. Choose the OS to repair and when asked "Command prompt"
  3. type Bootrec.exe

That should dot it. If failed for some reason, on stage 3, instead of bootrec.exe, type:

  1. /Map. Take note of the fully qualified device name to be repaired
  2. type /FixMbr fully_qualified_device_name
  3. type /FixBoot drive_letter

If that still fails (wow!) rebuild the entire BCD. Instead of the steps above, simply:

  1. type /RebuildBcd

EDIT: Without a Vista installation disk, you can use the XP disk and follow the above up to, and inclusive, FixBoot. To my knowledge the XP Recovery Console doesn't support RebuildBcd.

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  • I specifically said that I have NO Vista CD. Is there a way to do this with an XP disk, since I don't want Vista on there anymore anyway? Sep 13, 2009 at 4:41
  • Somehow I missed that. Edited my answer to include information for a windows xp installation disk.
    – A Dwarf
    Sep 13, 2009 at 18:03
  • Thank you for your help, but the steps above did not fix my MBR. I ended up using ERD Commander to recover key files, and started from scratch. Thank you anyway! Sep 18, 2009 at 5:39
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Try loading a grubloader (I have mine from linux). I killed mine too and this was the only way I could fix it without my windows cd. Hate Vista; keep xp.

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I've just had to do exactly the same. I found this post helpful: how-to-make-windows-bootloader-the-default

From the above, what I did was:

1)Boot from XP CD, select recovery console
2)Run fixboot
3)Run fixmbr
4)Restart

Worked fine

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  • Thank you for your help, but the steps above did not fix my MBR. I ended up using ERD Commander to recover key files, and started from scratch. Thank you anyway! Sep 18, 2009 at 5:39
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Used ERD Commander to recover key files, and then formatted the system and reinstalled XP. By no means elegant, but effective when you simply NEED to get back up and running.

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