Failing hard drive - and now boot manager is missing

Hello there.

I'm running windows 7 home premium 64-bit.
I have been getting a message saying there is problems with my hard drive recently and that I should back it up, this message comes up each time I log into windows.

I was waiting until pay day to get a new hard drive (which I've just bought) but perfect timing - my PC shut down in the middle of video editing and upon restart gives me the message "Boot manager is missing, press ctrl, alt, delete to restart" and just goes into a loop.

I tried several things as listed in various posts but nothing seems to work as suggested in the posts or as it should, I guess perhaps because the damaged sector on my hard drive? I don't know enough about these things to be sure which is why I'm here.

I have a new hard drive which I've now installed into the case but done nothing else with it so far, was wondering if perhaps the best option would be to install windows 7 on to this new hard drive and then perhaps transfer any data I need from the previous drive but I don't know where to start with this or even if it's is possible?

I can manage to boot into windows on the damaged drive sometimes by choosing it from the boot menu but this doesn't always work and I'm worried that the drive is going to give up for good at any moment.

Last time I managed to get back in I created a system repair disc by following one of the guides here, but after some hours of it doing it's thing it stated that system repair can't fix my problem.

Hoping that perhaps somebody can point me in the right direction or let me know what my choices are
as I need to get back up and running as soon as possible because I am a freelancer who works online.

Any help or advice is much appreciated.

Thank you.

If a HDD is failing, then anything on it is supposed to fail; so Boot Manager is.

It will be preferable to perform a clean reinstall of windows on the new disk.

For any data contained in the old failing disk, grab it later after doing the clean install.

If you set the CD ROM as the first boot device, then restart windows with the windows installer CD in, then it should say you to press any key to boot from CD or DVD.

Otherwise, use the Boot Menu Key. It should be written in your POST screen. Still, giving some common ones to you ....

No code has to be inserted here.

Restart the computer with the DVD in .... press and hold the Boot Menu key during POST screen. It will list up all the possible sources to boot from ... like this image below:

Scroll to the CD/DVD drive, hit enter. The Windows installer will be started.

I might have missed it, is your original hard-drive still inside the desktop? If so, in order to access this original nonBooting hard-drive: Later on, on another computer, download a Puppy Linux ISO, create either a usb boot or dvd boot, with the original HD inside, with another empty usb stick or usb external HD attached, boot Linux, migrate over to the folders and files you want to keep, copy said folders/files over to the external media. I'm at school, I am unable to step by step you through this; others will have to walk you through this process.

Kaide80 said:

I've ran into a problem, I managed to get as far as starting the windows installation and chose custom installation at which point it only lists my old failing hard drive and not the new hard drive on which I want to install windows.

I know it's connected right as it shows up in the boot menu and boot order in the bios so not sure why it's not showing as an option to install on to.

I haven't formatted it or anything as I wasn't sure if I needed to or even how to do that so I was wondering if possibly that's why it's not showing up as an option?

Please remove/disconnect the failing HDD. As it has an active partition there already, there is a fair chance of boot mistake if windows is installed with this one present.

After disconnecting the old one, and making it sure that the new one is properly connected, see if the installer finds the HDD. If not, initialize the HDD as stated in the video:



Connect the old/failing HDD back later, copy the data using windows explorer.

Later on, you can swap hard-drives, boot Puppy Linux and pull off the folders/files you want. I forgot it's better to have only one hard-drive attached when fixing boot problems. Thanks for the reminder, ARC! :)