Solved Asus Preload Wizard Problem on K501 Laptop

[VanGorder]

Windows 7 Error Recovery on Start-Up

Can anyone help me with this problem? First off, I purchased a Asus K501 laptop at a flea market over the weekend ( I know, I know...I can hear the snickering ). When I power it on all I get is a message :

"Boot MGR is missing. Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete."

...which doesn't work of course. I found a good thread on this forum offering some suggestions to that, the problem is you are supposed to boot into the System Recovery Option screen to proceed. I pressed F9 on start-up and I saw "Windows Boot Manager" with "Select an operating system to start" listed below that. The only option there was Windows Set-Up [EMS Enabled].

When I selected that I was taken to the Asus Preload Wizard, with 3 options :

- Recover Windows to first partition only
- Recover Windows to entire HD
- Recover Windows to entire HD with two partitions.

No matter which option I chose, I got a giant red lettered ERROR message with this displayed on top :

wimsetreferencefile 2 failed

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to correct this? ( Or what one earth this means! ) I'm not very computer savvy at all, so please talk in layman's terms. Does this mean that I might need a new HDD? Or would I have to purchase a brand-new Windows OS? I'm not even sure if this laptop came with Windows 7 or Vista preloaded. The product key on the back is worn but it looks like it says Windows 7, whereas when I looked up the K501 model online it looks like it was sold with Vista installed.

Any help would be appreciated!

 

[alphanumeric]

It sounds like the recovery partition is corrupted. It could be a failing hard drive to. You may be able to order a set of recovery disks from ASUS. They will likely charge you for them though. Can you read the entire product code from the COA sticker? You'll need to know the version of Windows installed too. If you can get that info off of the COA sticker you can use it to reinstall Windows.

 

[VanGorder]

Oh dear, yeah I wasn't sure whether to go with the recovery discs option, since it may just be a bad hard drive. Thanks for replying! As for the product key number for Windows, that I can read clearly...how would I go about getting it reinstalled, since I don't have an installation disc?

 

[VanGorder]

Problem solved! I booted the laptop to the DVD drive, put in a Windows System Repair disc which got me to the System Repair Menu and the Command Prompt window, and then the Terminator ( over at PCHelp ) told me to the following :

1. Open the Command Prompt from the System Recovery Options window.

2. When the Command Prompt window opens type the following commands, exactly as written below, in the order in which they are presented, and press enter after entering each command:

Bcdedit /export C:\BCD_Backup
ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
Bootrec.exe /rebuildbcd
BootRec.exe /fixmbr
BootRec.exe /fixboot
sfc /scannow /offbootdir=c:\ /offwindir=c:\windows
chkdsk c: /r
exit

3. If you receive any warnings or notifications asking you are you sure press Y to confirm.

4. After exiting the Command Prompt window, reboot the computer and see if the machine boots up properly.

That eliminated the BOOTMGR is missing problem.

Then I downloaded a Windows 7 64 bit ISO from Digital River using the Windows ISO-USB/DVD converter ( the first couple of discs I made weren't "bootable"...somethings we have to learn the hard way ). That got Windows re-installed and the product key was a-okay....so now I got a great little laptop running like a dream!

 

[gregrocker]

Van -

It wasn't necessary to repair the boot manager since you were reinstalling anyway from boot and should have deleted everything on the HD during the Clean Install Windows 7 Steps 7 and 8. The only reason to repair the boot is if there was something on the HD to boot - even the Recovery Setup which as suggested had itself failed.

Look over these steps to get and keep a perfect Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 to see how close you came to getting it correct based on what's worked best in countless thousands of installs we've helped with here. If not then I'd do it over so you have a perfect Win7 install, then stick with only the tools and methods given to keep it that way.

Enjoy Win7!