bootmgr missing after restoring with sysresccd

Question

I backed up my laptop months ago. Today i repartition the drive and used sysresccd with partimage to restore the HDD. I got a success msg after restoring however when booting i get a bootmgr missing error. How do i fix this?

Answer 1

You need to put grub back in the MBR, and the "no-man's land" between the MBR and the first partition. Usually this is done with grub-install. If you are doing this from a live CD (sysresccd) then you need to tell it the location of your hard drive partition, like this:

grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda1

where /mnt is where the partition is mounted and /dev/sda1 is the Linux name of the partition.

However, this installs whatever version of grub is on the live CD, rather than the one that's in the restored partition. You can use this to get your system booted and then run grub-install again from the booted system.

Alternatively, since your /boot/grub directory already contains the right files, you can use the lower-level grub-setup command:

grub-setup --directory=/mnt/boot/grub (hd0,0)

Then you don't need to re-run grub-install after booting.

Remember: modify /dev/sda and (hd0,0) above as appropriate for your system.

Answer 2

Neil's instructions will get you GRUB back on the MBR. If it's the Windows bootloader that you want, you'll need these steps.

This site has complete instructions on the repair of the Windows Vista/7 bootloader. http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/how-to-repair-the-windows-vista-bootloader/