Windows 7: Creating a recovery disk from a USB thumbdrive...

Hey all,

I installed 7 on my Dell laptop that has no CD-ROM drive. I created a partition (D and set it to Active, installed from that partition, doing a quick format over Vista (C.

All was fine and dandy, but I was getting some boot option, I'm assuming because the Active drive had the install files on it. No problem, I'll set the C: partition to Active.

Reboot, should go away right? Wrong. "Bootmgr is missing."

No problem, there has to be a way to fix this. I'll put the CD in and recover... Or not!

What I have is a 2 gig USB thumbdrive, is there anyway to fix this problem with that? If not, what are my options.



Using the factory Dell restore to get Vista back won't work, I bought the laptop secondhand and they screwed that up.

Can you boot Windows anymore? Or is what you're trying to do involve creating recovery media on a different computer?

I know Acronis makes a product called Disk Director that can create USB recovery media. You might even be able to do it with the trial version, I'm not sure. If it works, then all you have to do is reset the other partition as active. Then you can get into Windows and use other tools like the bcdboot command to put the necessary boot files on the other partition.