What a nightmare it was, to get this error yesterday, when I was booting my Laptop as usual.

BOOTMGR is MISSING
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to Restart

Here’s a ’screenshot’

I had never heard of this so, came online on my desktop and searched around different blogs, search engines & forums. The problem actually meant that the boot sector is corrupted and needs to be corrected. I got a lot of simple solutions around.The most common one and seemingly working one was :-

Easy fix to the “BOOTMGR IS MISSING” error on startup:

1. Boot to the Vista installation DVD.
2. Select Repair Your Computer
3. From the system recovery options menu, select Command Prompt
4. From the command prompt, run “bootrec /fixboot” (no quotes), which will re-write the Windows Vista boot sector code.
5. Exit command prompt and reboot the system.

Seems like, I did this and everything was fine?? No.. at least for me it was not :(.
Actually, my Laptop came with pre-loaded Vista Home Premium and hence, did not have any Vista Installation DVD. What was I to do??

I had to use the Recovery Disc provided with my Laptop. But the only problem for me was, that this Recovery Disc gave me the Laptop in its factory state. In simple words, all data would be lost.

For me it was safe, as I had ‘reset’ it to factory state just the earlier day. Then, again I installed the necessary softwares and now everything seems to be fine for me.

But, what to do with this buggy vista?? I am thinking to install Windows XP on the Laptop, to get rid of such errors. Or another thing, that can be done is to wait for SP1 final release. I hope that a lot of bugs must have been corrected in Vista SP1.

Another important thing! Why are buyers of computers with pre-loaded OS (especially Vista), not provided with a Installation disc of the OS??? A question that remains unanswered…… Do you know why??