Vista

[david.bullock.984]

My laptop had XP on it, but a french version. I installed Vista over the top of it, but cant get it to work. It installed correctly, then rebooted. Its now stuck on the black screen with the green bars going back and forth, and it just sits there. So I formatted the drive, went to load vista back on again as a clean copy, but I get the message that the BOOTMGR is missing. How do I correct this to load Vista back on. Hope someone can help.

[Xlphos]

Hello,

Does it vome up with this message when you try installing a fresh copy of vista? Or does this come up after installing vista?

[TheQuestor]

Try installing again. But when you get to the part where it asks where to install to click advanced and click on the drive and click delete. THEN select the drive and click next. Vista/7/8 likes to created a 200 meg boot partition and puts system tools and the BCD there. DO NOT manually format, let the windows installer do it.

[BigPaw]

Just a quick note to highlight something you need to be aware of... many laptops have what is known as a 'Restore Partition'. On this Restore Partition is the means to reinstall the original operating system. (in your case XP) If there is one it will only be a few GB (Gigabytes) in size, and the Vista installation disc may be seeing it and trying to install on what it sees as a bootable partition.

This may or may not be the case with your laptop, but it is important that you check for this possibility. You may want to return to XP, especially after trying Vista. :)

[david.bullock.984]

To Xlphos. I boot up the laptop with the Vista disk in the drive. It wont even load it up!! I get the same message. BOOTMGR is missing. Im really stuck here. To BigPaw. There isnt an original operating system on the laptop, because I formatted the drive. I cant get XP on the hard drive because when I boot up with the XP disk in the CD drive, it says that there are no valid hard drives to install it on.

[JorgeM]

It doesnt sound like your drive has been fully formatted. That's not an error message that your computer BIOS would display if no OS was found.

In any event, to fix this issue, you have to be able to boot from either CD or USB media.

Go into the CMOS/BIOS setup and look for the boot priority section. Make sure that your CD/DVD drive or USB is higher in priority than your hard drive.

ONce you have this configured, place your boot media in the CD or plug in your bootable USB stick and power on the computer.

Your setup program should prompt you on the screen.

[TheQuestor]

Go into your laptops bios and see if it is set to AHCI or IDE, XP without drivers will not see AHCI drives. Only IDE. OR get the AHCI Drivers from your manufacturer's webside and put them on a usb stick/floppy and press F3 [might be F6, it's been a LONG time since I installed XP]when XP's installer asks for it.

That said, if you are trying Vista again. when it get's to where it says where to install, if it shows the drive, click on advanced. Click on the drive and click delete. it will clear the partitions [keep clicking on partitions until all are deleted and only shows 1] then just click on it and hit next. Windows will auto create 2 partitions, 1 200 meg for the boot files and 1 for all your other stuff.