Vista - Major BOOTMGR is missing error

Good day,

I was trying to OC my tired system and upon a reboot I got the dreaded "BOOTMGR is missing, press ctrl alt del" error. I wasn't too worried since I've gotten this twice before doing other things in Vista.

I got out my Vista install disk, reset the boot order to make the CD the boot drive and rebooted. I got the message to press any key to boot from CD but when I pressed a key; instead of getting my Vista DVD to boot, I once again got the error message "BOOTMGR is missing...".

I thought my Vista DVD might be bad and tried it on this computer, and it worked just fine. I tried putting my Acronis recovery disk in my now defunct computer and it started and froze (thanks Acronis). So the Vista DVD seems to be OK, the DVD player seems to be ok, yet I can't boot from that DVD. I went as far as making all the boot devices on the inop computer the CD and still got the same message.

Any ideas on where to go from here? I seem to be in a major pickle here.

TY

In case anybody cares...

My extremely difficult problem was as usual, a very easy problem hiding in difficult problem clothes. Long story short is my USB keyboard was not being recognized, so when I'd "press any key" to start the CD, my computer didn't know a key was being pressed and it would try to boot from the HD with the bad BOOTMGR. The standard fix worked in this case.

It's odd that I had this problem considering I could hit DEL to enter the BIOS, and escape to go to the boot directory. The thing the zeroed me in though, was when I went to the boot manager, I could not scroll up and down using the arrow keys. Once I put two and two together, I found an old style keyboard (PS2, right?) and hooked that guy up. You'd think a MS keyboard would be good enough to press any key...

You need to enable legacy USB support in your bios for the USB keyboard to work before windows has loaded.

Your overclocking too much, you might not be able to get in the bios even.

clear cmos, or hold End while you start your computer

Everyone should have a PS2 keyboard in the closet...

I always hated PS2 keyboards..........

~Lordbob