# Bootmgr image is corrupt. The system cannot boot.



## Manic_Miner (May 20, 2009)

Dear forum, 

I have an Acer Aspire 5000 Laptop with a Toshiba HDD2A02 internal hard drive.

I recently used DBAN to wipe the entire drive including the hidden recovery partition, which I assume was wiped also when I used DBAN.

I intend to install windows 7 on to this laptop. 

Here are the problems I am having

- the recovery console does not work (or no longer exists) -ALT + F10 has no effect whatsoever.
- on booting the pc from the hard drive the message appears "Bootmgr image is corrupt. The system cannot boot."
- Disabling or enabling disc recovery or boot selection options in the bios has no effect.
- I cannot use the recovery console on any XP or Windows 7 installation disks
- I cannot install Windows 7 - the same message appears
- I cannot install Windows XP - the machine hangs during setup
- I cannot install Ubuntu in order to allow me to fix the MBR
- I cannot use Ubuntu Live setup either
- I created a boot CD from Universal Boot Disk untility - this does not work.
- I used my Acer recovery CD this did not work.
- I used my pre-supplied set of Acer Recover Disks and Bootable recovery Disk - this did not work.
- Recovery utilities such as Hiren's BootCD or Acronis Disk Director also fail to be able to allow me any access to repair the disk or its MBR.

It seems clear from this that the problem is the MBR or other related problem on the hard drive. To the best of my knowledge the hard drive is undamaged and in perfect working order.

I do not have a floppy drive so I cannot use a windows 98 startup disk. 

It seems to me that all I need to be able to do is to get a utility such as "fdisk" to run in order to restore my drive to the point where I can install a new OS on it. I had tried building an autobooting startup CD with fdisk on it, but when I tried to run fdisk, I got an error saying that it was the wrong version of DOS.

Does anyone know of any way that I can fix this drive using software that can be burned on to a CD?

Many thanks, 
Des.


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## Tergo247 (Sep 20, 2009)

I would put the drive in a different computer, get the files I cared about off it if possible, and reformat it there. If that works out, you should be able to place it back in the first computer and install as normal. Best of luck.


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## LastOne (Oct 8, 2009)

I am having somewhat of a similar problem, though lucky for my it's not with the drive with my OS on it!

I notice you don't have TestDisk in your list of things you've tried. It claims to be able to rebuild/repair the MBR of a drive. This is what I am considering with mine (it worked on a thumb drive which showed no files on it, even though I knew it had data on there).

But now I'm seeing that you can't even get an OS to install onto your drive and therein lies the problem. Ouch! In that case, I second Tergo247 in saying "go with using another computer to get something alive"


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## AustrAlien (Jun 10, 2009)

In the BIOS Setup Menu, set the CD-ROM as the first boot device in the "boot order" or "boot sequence" list (and disable 2nd and 3rd boot devices). Save the changes and exit the Menu to restart the system, after inserting one of the boot CDs, such as Hiren's or UBCD or Ubuntu. These should all boot!

Likewise, *a Windows 7 installation disk should load and allow you to partition and format the hard drive after using dban, and then install the OS*.

Something is not set quite right to allow your system to boot from a CD/DVD.
(This is assuming that your bootable disks are all correctly burned and that you have tested them as working in another system?)


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