BleepingComputer.com: Boot Impossible

I cannot boot in either safe or normal mode. When attempting to boot in safe mode, the drivers will load, I wait, the screen goes black & I get the words "safe Mode" in all 4 corners, the cursor moves, but nothing else. Sometimes I simply get a blue screen with a moveable curor. When running a diagnostic I get "boot manager is corrupt or missing". I cannot run system restore. I have the Vista 64 recovery disks from HP , but the computer will not boot from them (the choice to boot from the cd never appears); however, the computer will run the Vista 64 recovery disk I got from the internet, but it cannot find an operating system to repair. I have one 200gb hard drive, however when I run chkdsk, it calls the drive X & says there is only 3 gb there. One more thing, while booting I noticed the opportunity to go into the raid utility by pushing crtl N. I never put raid on my computer & there is no evidence of it in the boot consol. The computer is an HP Pavilion with an AMD Quad core processor runing windows 64, 6gb of ram, 200 gb hard drive. Of course I do not want to do a clean install of windows because I have a great deal on my HD I do not want to loose. Thank you in advance for your help!!

nemco1, on Jul 23 2009, 05:53 AM, said:

Have you considered using Knoppix Live CD (Linux) to try to rescue the important stuff to external storage media in the meantime?

Here's a link to a guide on how to do so. The version of Knoppix may have changed but the same principles apply:

http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/

Hope this is of some help?

You really want to try this:

1. Put the Windows Vista installation disc in the disc drive, and then start the computer.

2. Press a key when the message indicating "Press any key to boot from CD or DVD …". appears.

3. Select a language, a time, a currency, and a keyboard or another input method, and then click Next.

4. Click Repair your computer.

5. Click the operating system that you want to repair, and then click Next.

6. In the System Recovery Options dialog box, click Command Prompt.

7. Type Bootrec /RebuildBcd , and then press ENTER.

EDIT: Sorry just dawned on me that you said the disk will not pick up the OS. Emmm In the bois it definetly picks up your HDD?

This post has been edited by andrewww: 23 July 2009 - 03:41 PM