Error When Booting Windows Vista

I was working late last night on eGaming Supply on my desktop PC. I have an HP m7767c Media PC that I bought refurbished last year, and have never had any problems with it…until last night.

I run Windows Vista Ultimate on it, as it came with it pre-installed, and never had any major problems. Last night was a normal night, until I updated an open source software that ended up freezing my computer. I was able to restart the machine just fine, only to find a black screen (no blue screen of death like all other Windows versions, this time it’s a black screen) with an error about Windows Boot Manager not being present.

To learn about what it was, I did what I do to learn about anything: I searched Google and found an answer from Microsoft titled “Error message when booting Windows Vista“. What a title - it described everything I was experiencing.

The black screen was telling me to insert the Windows Vista installation or recovery CD that my computer manufacturer gave me. Of course, HP didn’t provide this CD, so I called them up hoping to get it. Their phone support was very discouraging and told me that “if I could afford such a nice PC, I should have no problem purchasing the recovery CD” as they haven’t provided recovery CDs with their computers since 2003. I was really offended that the guy on the phone was trying to say I had money and I should have no problem just handing it out - it’s the responsibility of the computer manufacturer to provide the recovery CD, not my responsibility to hand them more money.

Sure my PC had a recovery partition set-up and I could have done a system recovery, but I did NOT want to lose anything on my hard drive. Are you crazy? I had gigabytes of games, information, documents, spreadsheets, and music saved on my hard drive - I didn’t want to lose it, and I knew from Microsoft’s website that this was a common problem and easily fixable.

Since my computer manufacturer wasn’t going to help me, I again had to turn to Google and search for answers.

First I found a site containing information about a Windows Vista Recovery Disc provided from Microsoft, and then a link to a website called NeoSmart providing a Windows Vista Recovery Disc Download. (This website basically saved my hard drive and all my data - thank you so much NeoSmart!)

If you’re having the same problem as I did, go to that website, and download the Windows Vista Recovery Disc (x86 if your operating system is 32-bit, x64 if your operating system is 64-bit - if you don’t know which one you have, it’s probably the 32-bit version).

Download uTorrent and the torrent provided on NeoSmart after choosing your operating system’s version. Then after downloading the torrent, find the .iso file that you downloaded and burn it onto a CD. You’ll need to learn about burning .ISO files to CDs first, and then you’ll need to download ImgBurn so that you can do it properly. Follow the guide provided by NeoSmart to burn the .ISO file with ImgBurn.

Finally just pop in the CD you just burned and reboot your computer, click on “Repair My Computer” and follow the instructions from there (you’ll probably have to click on reboot and repair or something similar, just follow the instructions linked above provided by Microsoft for full extensive instructions).

Good luck, and I hope this helped you as much as the above referenced sites helped me!