ok, my step son bought a hp pavilion lappy that shoudl have had vista on it but it had been attempted upgrade to win7, which worked ok but no sound from it

so he wanted it back to vista

have got a vista disk, so tried to reinstall, it stopped at about 26% of expanding files, so I restarted and now getting

BOOTMGR is missing
ctrl+alt+del to restart

which just loops back if restarted

can I fix this, even if it means taking the hard drive into a caddy to access from another computer? other online guides say that the lappy should boot into the vista cd but it wont in this case

anyone help with any info?

So the laptop won't boot from the Vista disc, you've check the settings in the BIOS and there is no option to do that?

If that's the case (which seems unlikely), you could try making a bootable USB Vista installer (assuming the laptop can boot from USB). If it can only boot from HDD then yes, you'll need to load Vista from another machine.

I have now got the stage where I choose where vista goes, where there WAS a System partition I now have

Disk 0 Unallocated Space [this is where system was]
Disk 0 Partition 1

I need to set up the system partition again I think


[sorry, I am an XP fan, I have no idea with vista!]

Delete both partitions and just let the installer set them up again is the easiest way to do it

It might be too late now since you've tried a reinstall. This has happened to me several times before with Windows 7.

If your computer has a built in recovery thing try that, normally F10 on start up. If not boot the Vista disc but somewhere before installation you should be given a recovery option or a repair menu.
If you come across this option click on the recovering using Command Prompt and then type the following, hitting the enter return key between each line.

bootrec /FixMbr [enter]
bootrec /FixBoot [enter]
bootrec /RebuildBcd [enter]

I managed to get a command prompt and done an old fashioned format:c which seems to be processing

will then try again to install from the disk

nothing is ever straightforward when I need to do stuff like this!! :bang: