Help

[HugeJohnson]

Unlikely anyone will know what to do but I'm desperate. Installed windows 8 pro a couple of weeks ago, everything was working fine but today when I turned my pc on it said "bootmgr is missing". Have searched online but cannot find any solution. Booted from windows disk and tried automatic repair but it couldn't fix it (no error log either) tried system restore but it says i have to choose which operating system to restore from (although gives no option to choose operating system) can't refresh pic because the disk is locked and doesn't tell me how to unlock it. Really don't want to clean install as I have important files etc on the computer not to mention about a Tb of music, tv shows and movies that I haven't backed up (I know )

Anyone?.... I will love you forever

 

[The Passenger]

Port_Adelaide

obviously somehow you or a malicious program has deleted your boot manager. more likely is that you've delete your master boot record (where you playing around with the partitions by any chance? it's easy enough to do if your being careless as i've done to myself once)... the MBR is a small partition on your hard drive that the BIOS opens up first and it goes 'ok you've got a windows OS on this partition and I can't see any other operating systems so we'll boot up the windows OS straight up'

Before I go any further I don't know if this will work for Windows 8 as I've not used one yet, and god willing I'll never have too. Typically I wouldn't give this warning but from what I understand is Microsoft have made it very difficult to tinker with Windows 8 PC's. For instance I've been reading pretty much everyone is having trouble installing linux on a computer which has W8 pre-installed, and quite a few people just flat out not being able to do it. So with that said I don't know what they've done with creating book disks, and utilities that allow you to **** around with the nuts and bolts of a computer.

Anyway, first thing i would do is download the ultimate boot cd

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

instructions on downloading and how to turn it into a boot cd is here

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

there's about 200 utilities on that thing, but i reckon the one you're most likely to need is MBRTool. User manual for this tool is here - http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/MBRtool_manual.htm

what level of technical competence do you have? if it's low, using these utilities may be a bit tricky. i would suggest finding a technical friend to come around and help you, or you may even have to take it to a shop with the cd.

i would be very surprised if there wasn't something on that cd which won't fix your computer.

 

[The Passenger]

Here's something that is worth reading as well mate

http://neosmart.net/blog/2012/tools...er-your-new-windows-8-installation/#more-1452

EasyBCD is pretty good, i've used it on some things before, but once again Windows 8 is a different beast.

Hopefully you get it going. When you do the first thing you're going to do is partition your hard drive into two so that you have a data partition and an operating system partition. that way when stuff like this happens you can just re-install the OS. Not ideal, but at least you're data stays safe. This is the first thing every person should do when buying a new computer.

 

[HugeJohnson]

Here's something that is worth reading as well mate

http://neosmart.net/blog/2012/tools...er-your-new-windows-8-installation/#more-1452

EasyBCD is pretty good, i've used it on some things before, but once again Windows 8 is a different beast.

Hopefully you get it going. When you do the first thing you're going to do is partition your hard drive into two so that you have a data partition and an operating system partition. that way when stuff like this happens you can just re-install the OS. Not ideal, but at least you're data stays safe. This is the first thing every person should do when buying a new computer.

Cheers for the info, appreciate it.

After 5 hours of mucking around with the cmd prompt I finally got it working again. First tried chkdsk but that didnt come up with anything so kept going back and forth playing with things I had no idea about (probably unwise..) like selecting different disks and partitions and making them active etc...
Eventually found my way to bootrec and entered
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildbcd

restarted the computer and then got the error "Operating system wasn't found"
Thought I'd really stuffed it up then. Booted from cd again and found that I could use system restore now and select windows 8 OS, did that and rebooted...still nothing. Nearly gave up and decided to try auto repair again and this time it worked and booted all good!

First thing I'm doing is backing up everything! May even just clean install windows again after that to be on the safe side?

Cheers

 

[The Passenger]

good stuff mate

once you back everything up, partition your hard drive using this tool http://download.cnet.com/Easeus-Partition-Master-Home-Edition/3000-2248_4-10863346.html

separate your data from your OS, that way you can do a clean install off your OS any time you want without affecting your data.

 

[HugeJohnson]

good stuff mate

once you back everything up, partition your hard drive using this tool http://download.cnet.com/Easeus-Partition-Master-Home-Edition/3000-2248_4-10863346.html

separate your data from your OS, that way you can do a clean install off your OS any time you want without affecting your data.

Didn't even know you could do that, thanks man

 

[The Passenger]

Didn't even know you could do that, thanks man

it's easy enough to do once you've done it a few times, but make sure you back up your data first and that way any **** ups aren't near as bad. You'll most likely have to clear the data off first to make space, in which case make two back ups.

have a look for some tutorials 'windows 8 partitioning', 'easeus partitioning' (I'm not sure if easeus is supported on W8), and that should do the job for you

A Typical set up for Windows is about 30% OS, 70% Data, but you shouldn't have to go above 100gb for your OS partition unless your running some seriously heavy gaming. I've got one laptop at home that I've purposely bloated with software so I can test stuff on a poor running machine, and it's still only about 75gb from memory. Mind you, i'm not sure how much space W8 takes up.

There's also a built in partition manager for windows that will do the job for most users.

 

[HugeJohnson]

good stuff mate

once you back everything up, partition your hard drive using this tool http://download.cnet.com/Easeus-Partition-Master-Home-Edition/3000-2248_4-10863346.html

separate your data from your OS, that way you can do a clean install off your OS any time you want without affecting your data.

Another question, just backed everything up, how do I go about separating the data from the OS? Is it a matter of copying it to a different hard drive or is there some way of partitioning them
If I partitioned 100GB of the hard drive that windows 8 is already installed on and used that to do a clean install, wouldn't I have two Windows 8 copies installed on different partitions? And would all the programs that are installed on one partition have to be installed again to use on the clean install? Sort of confused...

 

[The Passenger]

Another question, just backed everything up, how do I go about separating the data from the OS? Is it a matter of copying it to a different hard drive or is there some way of partitioning them
If I partitioned 100GB of the hard drive that windows 8 is already installed on and used that to do a clean install, wouldn't I have two Windows 8 copies installed on different partitions? And would all the programs that are installed on one partition have to be installed again to use on the clean install? Sort of confused...

If you've got your system up and running I probably wouldn't re-install Win8. But if you are going to, I'd do that before you do anything. This will means you'll need to re-install all your software, and it will overwrite your data so make sure your data is backed up twice (Should always have 2 copies of your data at all times, preferably 3 to be honest)

Once Windows is re-installed you can create the partitions using the either the Win8's built in Disk Management, or a better tool like EaseUS, but for now I'll just run you through the built in Manager

How to access Disk Management Windows 8
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows-8/a/disk-management-windows-8.htm

In Win 7 you go control panel -> system and security -> administrative tools -> computer management -> disk management

I imagine it's the same in Windows 8.

The Disk Management screen looks like this:

Most likely you've got one disk and one volume (volume and partiton are the same). What you need to do is right click on that volume and click "shrink volume", and you shrink that to whatever size you want. What size is best? Well I reckon about 1/3rd of your total hard drive space, but no more than 100GB, and even then you'll only need anything near 100GB for your OS if you're planning on installing huge programs such as adobe photoshop, microsoft visual studio and some games. I'm also assuming Win8 takes up about 20 to 25gb on install.

Once this volume is shrunk the Disk Management screen will show that you have unallocated memory (Refer to the picture above, disk 3 has unallocated memory at the end). Right click on the unallocated memory and click "New Volume" and follow the steps.

When it asks you volume type use "Primary Volume" (doesn't really matter), it will probably ask what File System you want to use, this should be NTFS (don't use FAT32 if there is an option for that), and when it asks you what size you'd like the volume, just use the maximum amount of space available. It will also ask you the drive letter, you can use anyone you want except "C" as that is used by the OS. And it will also ask you for a label, something like "Data" will do fine. It shouldn't, but if at any point it asks you for the "partition style" then you want it to be "MBR".

This will keep your data separate from your OS which is much more desirable, if you need to re-install or upgrade Windows, if Windows is corrupted, and it's just generally better computer management.

Further instructions:

How to partition in Windows 7 (I can't imagine it's changed much for Win8)
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows7/ht/partition-hard-drive-windows-7.htm

Just take your time and if at any point your asked to format something, make sure you read what the screen is saying and ensure you want to do what it is saying. You may be asked to format your new volume, which is fine, but I don't think you will be, I can't remember.

But you don't want to format the volume which your OS resides on and you don't want to format your entire hard drive. Once you've done this a couple of times it literally takes about 5-10 minutes to set up a properly partitioned system and it's much much quicker to do on a new system than one which has loads of data, programs etc,. loaded onto it.