Windows 7: Recovery Partition

Hi everyone. I thought I had a virus on my Pc, so I wanted to return back to factory settings. I put my recovery disk in the Pc and followed the prompts. when the Pc restarted, It had the error message--BOOTMGR MISSING. I did the above operation several times and still received the same error message. The odd thing is I can view the recovery partition in the MY COMPUTER folder. How do I get the recovery partition to work again. I have restored the OS with the disk Dell gave me, but I would like to use the option to recovery the factory settings. Any help will be appreciated. deanie44

bootmgr missing can be fixed , you don't have to reinstall again.
Bootmgr is missing - Fix

Try running the Recovery Partiiton from boot which is much more stable than trying to run the disks. You should save the disks for when the HD dies. Dell - Restoring to the Factory Settings

It sounds like you have a Windows 7 Installation DVD from Dell, which are no longer issued and quite valuable since you can clean reinstall your OS without the factory bloatware or useless factory utitilies which have much better versions built into Windows 7. If you want to try getting a perfect reinstall follow these tips: Reinstalling Windows 7 - Windows 7 Forums

Hi everyone. In my last post I made the recovery partition active, which I couldn't use anymore. Using Dispart, I made the recovery partition inactive. Unfortunately, I am receiving an error on reboot--no boot device available, press enter to retry. Is there anyway that I can correct my error without reinstalling the operating system? I am using my notebook to communicate this post. Any help will be appreciated. deanie

You should not make the recovery partition active because it is not there where you have the bootmgr. The bootmgr is either on the 100MB active (mostly hidden) partition or on your C partition. The MBR will never find the bootmgr if you fool it.

I suggest you use the bootable CD of this program ( http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-...n-manager.html ) to see what's going on.

1) Dells can normally be restored via F8 or Ctrl+F11, what is this recovery disk that you used first? Is it the factory image dvd or a system repair disk or what?

2) You said you've restored the OS with the disk dell gave you, please specify whether this is the factory restore disk or the clean OS reinstall disk that dell no longer gives out.

If you've indeed "clean installed", it makes things slightly tricky. Dells use a custom mbr that gives you a dell restore entry in the repair options on F8 and lets ctrl+F11 work. Now if that mbr has been overwritten, the link to the recovery partition is lost.

As for boot files, please note many dells have them on the recovery partition and not on system reserved or the OS partition, wierd as that may sound. Probably windows is chain loaded. That may be the reason your windows refuses to boot.

If you post a snip of disk management, things will be clearer. Of course, you can also copy out the wims sitting in the recovery partition and apply them with imagex but thats a bit involved.