Hi All,

My son has dropped my 1.5 y/o HP Pavillion 9000 ......... No, he is still alive.
The thing refused to load OS (Vista Ultimate 64bt) after that and failed bios hard drive test.
So, I bought another drive and ordered recovery disk from HP. Their support has some of the dumbest reps EVER btw.
Last night I received the HD and the discks and began installation. All went well for about an hour and I was even able to start using windows, while the installation kept doing on in the background. I left it to run overnight and when I woke up this morning, I was fully expeting to have a "brand new" laptop.
No Such Luck. I woke up to see a black screen with a message stating that "BOOTMGR Missing PRESS CRT, ALT< DEL TO RESTART". Restarting yelded the same result

I will run through the restoration one more time tonight, but I doubt that I could do anything different. The process simply doesn't give you any choices.

If anyone has any ideas why this BOOTLDR is missing after I just installed the brnad new version of OS fom HP's own disk, please HELP!!!

Many thanks in advance.

I would start out by going into your bios and making sure hardrive boots up first. You probably have dvdrom boot first enabled when you reinstalled Vista. Set your boot option to hardrive first and post back if this fixes it. Oh, and welcome to DAL.

Thanks a lot for the suggestion!
I should have thought of it, since it just boots from DVD first by default.
The only thing is, if it does not find OS on DVD it should switch to HD automatically.
At least that's how it worked on all the older PCs I've had...
Since I posted here, I was able to locate a ton of info on possibly repairing this issue on line.
Apparently, I am not the only one.

One of the most prevalent suggestions is to use HP system repair utility via GUI or through CMD.

I'll try that and your suggestion tonight and report on the progress.

P.S.
Thanks for the welcome.