BOOTMGR is missing

DO NOT ACT until these details are confirmed. I have worked on many dual boot machines in my day -- however I never deleted the boot partition of a dual boot machine. What is the ultimate goal for this machine a single boot windows 2003 server or something else?

Dual boot machines are tricky as Vista was the first operating system on the machine I believe the option to boot the windows 2003 server partition was added to the boot.ini file in the Vista Partition -- assuming Vista maintains that tradition from Windows NT. If you want I could research the reconstruction of boot blocks, etc.

The repair would probably involve at a minimum using a partitioning program on bootable media to flag the Windows 2003 partition as the boot partition. What is required beyond that will require research.

Another option could be to install a third party boot controller such as System Commander which recognised operating systems in existing partitions and enabled them as a boot choices. That might be most viable only if you are considering adding another operating system to the machine to allow system commander to be installed. (similarly the boot.ini entry could be added after installation of a windows nt based operating system too)

A DOS boot disk with system commander on it may allow access to the Windows 2003 system as a work around but who has dos around anymore with an appropriate version of system commander for dos that would recognise windows 2003?

i have a problem when my external drive is in the usb and i start my laptop it says bootmgr is missing how can i sort this problem as i have to take it out of the usb plug to get my laptop working the i plug the external drive back in and it works,

Hello there,

I just encountered that problem earlier.
I insert my Xp operating system to boot my computer but it doen't work..

so what I do is that I used windows Vista OS and it worked! now its on progress:)