Boot Manager Missing/Recovery stalls on Disc 5 - readable on PCs

[TessaH47]

Hello all ... Hope someone can help-

My nephew took my laptop and instead of asking me to sign in using my own PW he somehow set up two additional accounts. When I got it back from him it was missing the boot manager. I got my recovery discs for the laptop I'd purchased last year thinking it would do the trick. I can't seem to get it complete a repair or complete system restore. It keeps giving me the following error messages:

REPAIRING C DRIVE:

Your C: drive is too small or may not exist.

Click OK to return to the Vaio Recovery Center main menu. From the menu select "Restore Complete System" to perform a complete system recovery.

COMPLETE SYSTEM RECOVER ON DISC 3 first time, then Disc 5 on all other attempts. Both are readable on other PC's and Laptops with the ability to open files I can open.

An error occurred while executing an application.

While attempting recovery a necessary file was not found. Check your recovery disc's condition and try recovery again. If this error occurs again the recovery disc may be corrupted or damaged.


I checked the DVD and it runs fine. Checked the hard drive and its reporting no problems.

I suspect its the missing boot manager situation or maybe something my nephew did to make it possible to by pass my admin account and set up additional admin account and a guest user account. I'm not sure, but I didn't think it was possible to set up additional user accounts without signing in.

Now, as it stands my laptop is a nice huge paper weight. Any suggestions of ideas on how to fix this and how this happened would be appreciated.

Thank you!

Tessa

 

[Mark Phelps]

Without going into the details, it's safe to tell you that with a 5-minute Google exercise, you can easily find websites from which you can purchase a CD that will allow you to BLANK the Admin password on a Windows PC. Once you do that, you can eventually log in as the Administrator and do whatever you want. Not saying they did that; just saying it's not hard to do if you know how. When I used to work in InfoSec, we had a saying "Once they have access to the hardware, they can do anything they want".

As to your problem, if you have Win7 install DVD, you could try booting from it and running Repair to see if it will restore the loader files and repair the BCD.

If you don't have such a DVD, you can purchase the ISO image for a Win7 Repair CD from the link, burn that to a CD, boot from that, and run Startup Repair: Download Windows 7 System Recovery Discs — The NeoSmart Files

 

[TessaH47]

thanks for responding Mark.

Good to know how this might have happened. Could It have Messed up the boot Manager too?

I guess I didn't do a good job of explaining. I have tried that you suggested many times with the following results:


I got my recovery discs for the laptop I'd purchased last year thinking it would do the trick. I can't seem to get it complete a repair or complete system restore. It keeps giving me the following error messages:

REPAIRING C DRIVE:

Your C: drive is too small or may not exist.

Click OK to return to the Vaio Recovery Center main menu. From the menu select "Restore Complete System" to perform a complete system recovery.

COMPLETE SYSTEM RECOVER ON DISC 3 first time, then Disc 5 on all other attempts. Both are readable on other PC's and Laptops with the ability to open files I can open.

An error occurred while executing an application.

While attempting recovery a necessary file was not found. Check your recovery disc's condition and try recovery again. If this error occurs again the recovery disc may be corrupted or damaged.


I checked the DVD and it runs fine. Checked the hard drive and its reporting no problems.

I suspect its the missing boot manager situation or maybe something my nephew did to make it possible to by pass my admin account and set up additional admin account and a guest user account. I'm not sure, but I didn't think it was possible to set up additional user accounts without signing in.

Now, as it stands my laptop is a nice huge paper weight. Any suggestions of ideas on how to fix this and how this happened would be appreciated.


IF ANYONE CAN HELP ME FIGURE OUT WHY IT COULDN'T READ ...oopps sorry for the caps ... why its threw an error saying the disc was corrupt or missing a file - first with cd #3 then again with disk #5 out of 6, that would be great.