Im at my wits end here, and in a desperate situation, so hopefully some of you guys can help me out.
My girlfriend is using a Gateway laptop, running Vista Home Premium 32bit. Today, after about 18 months or so with zero issues, I got the Bootmgr Is Missing Ctrl-Alt-Del error. I am a hardcore XP user, so I tried my best to help, and searched for answers. It seemed alot of people have solved this error by booting from the Vista dvd rom and trying a repair.
So I go and do that, pop the dvd in, and boot. I hit any key, and the windows loading bar at the bottom starts to load up. All is fine so far. After about a minute, the Microsoft logo appears at the bottom with the animation bar loading ... again, all is fine so far.
Then I get to a blue-ish desktop, and the system completely stops responding. The dvd is no longer spinning, and the hard drive light is out. The initial Windows screen that is suppossed to pop up to allow you to begin an install/repair absolutely refuses to appear. Ive sat there 15 mins and nothing. Curiously enough, the mouse pointer works just fine, but I cant do anything !!!!
Ive also tried Safe Mode, and picked lots of the options there, and again .. the drivers will load and get me to a desktop, and then the system completely stops with no window to click on to begin.
Im not a Vista pro, so if any of you guys have any ideas on how I can force the boot section to repair and get this fixed, Id be greatly appreciated. If it matters, there is a seperate D: recovery partition on the hard drive, but after looking in bios to force that to boot, I dont see any options (if that even applies to fixing this). I am not looking to format. I just want to repair, there is simply to many things on the drive that cannot be replaced. A step by step answer would be most appreciated.
If the hard drive is corrupted you will get those types of errors. Do a chkdsk c: /f on the hard drive. You might have to use a bartpe bootcd since the vista dvd won't load.
