Boot manager missing ... help please

Your help is really appreciated with this problem.

The situation:
My daughter owns a lenovo 3000 n200 notebook running vista business. I purchased a hitachi 320GB drive to replace her existing hitachi 160 GB drive. I cloned the existing drive (147gb) onto the 320 gb drive using Acronis 11 (trial copy). Acronis said the clone was successful. On my computer there were the two partitions that were cloned. I then inserted the 320gb drive into the notebook.

The problem:
I turned on the notebook and the lenovo screen popped up. Then I got a message that the boot manager was missing; hit control, alt, delete to start again. I thought a vista repair function was necessary. So I inserted a vista anytime upgrade dvd into the dvd drive and rebooted. I clicked next button after I confirmed english as the language. On the following window there was an option to install windows. However, there was not an option to do a repair.

My questions:
1. Did I follow the correct procedure in using the repair function on the WAU dvd to correct the missing boot manager?

2. Any reason as to why the repair button was not showing up?

Again, thanks for your help. This is my first attempt at cloning a hardrive.


David

 

I think the clone process might not have copied the recovery partition correctly, if at all! I have had this issue with a few HP laptops. I'm unsure of why the repair option on the cd/dvd is not there! Is it greyed out or just not there alltogether? If you can burn a image to a cd then you could download and boot 'Bootit' http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-next-generation.htm follow on screen instructions then boot into Vista and download 'easy BCD' http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1 (link right at bottom of page) and run that.

 

Everway9... thanks for the reply. With regard to the WAU dvd, the repair optioin was not listed. I will give the easy BCD a try. For now i popped in the old 160gb hard drive into the notebook. Thanks again.

David

 

Hi to all ... it has been a few weeks since i sought help for the missing boot manager problem after cloning my daughter's notebook harddrive. Here is an update:

I deleted the original clone of the old hard drive. I then performed the clone function again onto the new hard drive. I popped the new into the notebook. I booted the notebook using the vista dvd and clicked on repair. However, the window that is supposed to contain the operating system i want to repair is blank. Simply put no operating system is visible. So I clicked next anyway. A repair started and ended saying that the repair could not be performed.

I am really puzzled as to what is wrong. Can anyone help me figure out why the cloned copy on the new hard drive is not working?

 

Hi again,

Did you download Bootit? If so can you boot into Vista using that? If so have you used Easy BCD yet?

 

Check if Clone is successfully created , if yes then we can reapair the boot loader using Bootable Vista DVD

Just type

Code:

bootrec /fixmbr
         bootrec /fixboot

in the recovery console .

 

Recovery console? On Vista DVD? Do you mean the Command prompt?

 

Yes , Boot from Vista DVD and select repair option > recovery console or simply console.