Please help. Issues appear to be snowballing

cnmsales · 28 Oct 2013

Hey friends. So I have a co-worker who came to me last week and asked me to look at their PC. So I brought it home tonight. She originally reported a possible virus and stuck in a boot loop.

So the first few times trying to boot into repair didn't seem to do anything. I then decided to let it sit and after about 20 min did finally boot into it. Great, this is a Dell Inspiron 2320 all in one, so I selected to send it back to factory and we are off. Everything goes through fine. Finish up the restore and restart.

Upon restarting I am now getting the error "BOOTMGR is missing
Press Ctrl Alt Del to restart"
Now this is what I get immediately after the bios load screen. If I try to do F8 now nothing happens. So I have a windows 7 ERD disk. Throw it in and boot to it and it doesn't detect a windows installation so therefore the startup repair util doesn't work. Bring up dos and try performaing the suggestion listed at How do I restore the Master Boot Record?

No joy.

So at this point I could use some advice. When in DOS from the ERD disk ig I go to c: and DIR I get nothing, however if I go to X: and dir I get a typical windows folder hierarchy. I could really use some suggestions on what to try. Not sure if she is on 64bit or 32 bit but I tried with both version of ERD. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Pendaws · 02 Nov 2013

This could be a memory issue? If the Laptop has more than one memory module, try taking one out and booting with that.
I am assuming that you know how to remove the ram? If it DOES have 2 modules take both out, leave for about 15 mins. and then try one at a time to see if this helps. If the Laptop DOES start on one module then you may have an issue with the other one.

SandeepP · 04 Nov 2013

cnmsales said:

Hey friends. So I have a co-worker who came to me last week and asked me to look at their PC. So I brought it home tonight. She originally reported a possible virus and stuck in a boot loop.

So the first few times trying to boot into repair didn't seem to do anything. I then decided to let it sit and after about 20 min did finally boot into it. Great, this is a Dell Inspiron 2320 all in one, so I selected to send it back to factory and we are off. Everything goes through fine. Finish up the restore and restart.

Upon restarting I am now getting the error "BOOTMGR is missing
Press Ctrl Alt Del to restart"
Now this is what I get immediately after the bios load screen. If I try to do F8 now nothing happens. So I have a windows 7 ERD disk. Throw it in and boot to it and it doesn't detect a windows installation so therefore the startup repair util doesn't work. Bring up dos and try performaing the suggestion listed at How do I restore the Master Boot Record?

No joy.

So at this point I could use some advice. When in DOS from the ERD disk ig I go to c: and DIR I get nothing, however if I go to X: and dir I get a typical windows folder hierarchy. I could really use some suggestions on what to try. Not sure if she is on 64bit or 32 bit but I tried with both version of ERD. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Hi cnmsales,

Welcome to Seven forums.

Please make sure there is no disk inside the CD drive while you are booting the system. Make sure no USB devices or memory card is inserted in the system.

Then also if it still gives the same message then you can check this tutorial below:

Failure to Boot

Also, run hardware diagnostics on the harddrive of the system to confirm its functionality:

http://dell.to/18xQpRy

Keep us posted with the results so we can advise you further.