boot manager error

[tombutcher1990]

Hi guys, not sure if this is the correct place to put this, but if not feel free to move it!

i've got a friend's laptop that i said i would take a look at for them. they were using it fine, and then they booted it up one time and got a "boot manager error, press ctrl alt delete to restart"

i did a bit of googling and people reckoned you needed to do a repair. now, only problem was, that when i booted from the vista disc, it gets a boot manager error! and this is before i manage to get as far as the recovery bit.

now, they back it up regularly, so i checked with them, and they said it was ok to blank the drive. so i blanked it with a 3rd party tool i've got (as i couldn't get into the windows cd to format it with that) when i then inserted the windows CD, i still get the error!! i have now also put in a brand new hard drive i had spare, and what do you know, its the same error still!!!

this has got me well and truly stumped. i've been googling it for a few days, but the only solutions i can find is people saying use the recovery cd.

anyone got any ideas on this one?

 

[roy69]

Have you told the BIOS to boot from CD first?

 

[tombutcher1990]

yes, it is attempting to boot off of the CD, it does the "loading files" part, and then errors.

i've also tried booting from XP and 7 media, both of which also have errors.

 

[roy69]

You may have diagnostics you can use to test the hard drive and cd and memory built into the bios. Do this first.

See if you can boot from a usb stick: look here for instructions.
Boot From A USB Flash Drive

If you can boot into this then we are at least getting somewhere. (This is for diagnostics).

I find it strange you are getting the same error on different drives and disks.

 

[tombutcher1990]

trust me, i do too!

i work as an IT technician, so i can borrow our full diagnostics that we have at work.

i can boot from CD and USB, but not when there is a windows media in there!

i get the feeling this is going to be a really weird hardware fault....


i've also now found another article from a few years ago, where they talk about formatting the drive in another computer and flashing the bios. now, i can do the first bit, but the bios can only be flashed from within windows! thanks acer (Y)

my only last ditch attempt, will be to insert the hard drive into another laptop, kick it off building there, and then just cut it off, put it back in the original laptop, and carry on! one hell of a bodge, but i'm running really low on ideas....

 

[roy69]

Take the HD out of the laptop.
Use the flash drive to boot the computer and have the bin files to flash the computer on the same stick.
HP do a utility for this I belive, however it would not be to hard to make a batch file or do it manualy.
Look here first for resources HP CD Downloads | Drivers | User Guides | Service Manuals | Boot Restore Diagnostic Disk | Recovery CDs |

also more info
BIOS Update per bootable USB-Stick
Boot from USB - How to Boot your Computer from a Bootable USB Device - Boot Flash Drive

This looks good

How to flash your BIOS without a floppy drive - Mobile Computer Mag

To rule out a hardware fault intall linux, if this works then the laptop sould be ok.