Bootmgr is missing - is hard drive toast?

Hello Paul mate that should have run with no problem at all - could have been a few tings from a bad burn to some corruption creeping in but I have never had problems with this one. I burnt mine with ImgBurn but just lately I have shown this which I found easier in my own thread Making a duplicate ISO disk post#2 from Jumanji.

That site I gave you was one from a while ago and others have used it and this is the latest site https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootFromCD have a read of this as well.

There is also this Emergency Kit - save your files from a dead OS

Never personally used it but guessing your problem could possibly be related to no storage volume attached to the computer, Im wondering if it requires a HDD attached to the machine to use some form of pagefile or similar temp storage on the HDD
This is a pure speculation though on my part

heres the wiki summary
"initramfs, abbreviated from "initial RAM file system", is the successor of initrd ("initial ramdisk"). It is a cpio ("copy in and out") archive of the initial file system that gets loaded into memory during the Linux startup process."

Hello Pauly mate just reading your reply gave me the idea maybe the RAM could possibly be a shade out of whack (chipset) because reading the Wikipedia article it does mention the system needing to load all the drivers before anything else can be loaded up. Mind you it does mention a Linux based system??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initramfs

Its definitely worth a try incase the sata controller on your original machine is defective and that is why the disk is not being read, unlikely but possible.

Fingers crossed

I would assume the faulty drive is corrupting the system somehow which to me further confirms the drive is indeed toast

Well you could run the Ubuntu in the slave machine for that matter and hook up with an adaptor.

Plus there is nothing to stop you using the adaptor with the "faulty" machine