A virtual machine with operating system 2008 R2 shows the following error during startup: „BOOTMGR is missing Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart“ It is relatively easy to fix this error – here is a short how-to. This article was published about five years ago on my first blog written in German. But as I was in need of the solution today, I decided to quickly translate and repost it here (Olden but Golden if you need it). How to Fix “Bootmgr is missing”:. connect the OS installation disc (.iso) to the CDROM (if necessary change the boot options to boot from CD).
start the VM and boot into the OS setup. click “next” in the upcoming “Install Windows” wizard (Language). In the next window select “Repair your Computer” to open the “System Recovery” Wizard. If your operating system is listed, select “next”. If no OS is listed, change the selection box to “Restore your computer using a system image that you created earlier”.
It’s no problem if you do not have a system image. All that we want is to access a command prompt. And this is possible in the next window independent from the options above.
Note To complete these steps, you must have a Windows 8.1, Windows 8, Windows 7 or Windows Vista installation disc. If you do not have a disc, please contact your computer manufacturer or Microsoft Support to obtain one.
Select “Command Prompt” here:. Now we can fix the MBR error. Just use the following commands in the order specified below: change to C: and execute: BCDBOOT C: Windows BOOTREC /FIXMBR BOOTREC /FIXBOOT BOOTREC /REBUILDBCD BOOTREC /SCANOS. Now type “Exit” to close the command prompt and reboot the server. It should boot now without any problems!
There are a lot of things floating around about putting in different DVDs and running gparted and taking care of this issue in thousands of different ways. I’ve read all over the internet that there’s no option in Server 2008’s installation CD to actually repair. There’s also a lot of hoopla about having to use VMware Converter when you are working with a VM that’s giving you this error. Here’s what to do if you your Windows 2008 R2 Server gives you the error Bootmgr is missing Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart:. Either put in your Windows 2008 R2 CD or mount the ISO.
Boot to the CD and choose to Repair. Go through all of the steps to get to the option to go to command prompt. Enter said command prompt. You’ll start at x: sources. cd x: sources recovery. run StartRep.exe. This will start a repair.
Let the repair continue until it is done. Run the repair again, even after a reboot and into the CD again if you need to. It took two tries for my VM to finally start working. The two repairs were this simple. But I was done after that and went on my merry way. If you had to do something more than this I’d love to hear it.
The only other issue I’ve seen that took more than this was when a drive lost its boot flag, which can be fixed with gparted.