Fix “BOOTMGR is missing, press Ctrl+alt+delete to restart” on Windows 7

BOOTMGR plays an important role in successfully booting the local drive and starting the Windows. BOOTMGR can be found on Vista, Windows 7 & Server 2008. BOOTMGR uses the file named 'winload.exe' to interact with the system kernel and to load other booting information stored in the drive. Any type of modification can leads to corruption of BOOTMGR and your system will start to different Windows error messages. In the case of boot manager corruption, you will get the following error messages:

“BOOTMGR is missing
Press Cntl +alt + Delete to restart”

OR

“BOOTMGR is missing
press any key to restart”

or

“couldn't find BOOTMGR”


Restarting after this error will not mitigate the problem and the error will continue to appear unless and until it meets the BOOTMGR requirements.

Why This Happen With Your System:

Whenever you start the system, the BOOTMGR initialized itself and search your hard drive partition or any other device that containing the information required booting the system. If BOOTMGR couldn't find the specified device, this error will come in existence. The reason is as simple as one may think and likely to be resolved very easily if certain steps are followed carefully.
The well known causes behind this error could be:

• Hard disk drive sectors and blocks become corrupted
• Something wrong with your BIOS settings
• BOOTMGR mistakenly tries to boot from the device that is never existed or previously used such as floppy disk, CD-DVD drive etc due to mis configured BIOS settings.
• Booting files i.e., boot.ini, ntldr, ntdetect, MBR etc. become corrupted
• Unsuccessful Windows Upgrade
• Damage SATA or IDE cable.

 
How can you remove This Error?
 

Difficulties to remove this error can vary from easiest to difficult, depending on the level of which the error occurs.

Option 1:

• If you want some instant troubleshooting steps to remove this error, here's how:
• Restart the system and the error may disappear, because  BOOTMGR shows this error in mistakes
• Remove any floppy disk or CD/DVD contained in the drive, as sometime BOOTMGR tries to boot the system from these drives
• Check hard drive IDE & SATA cables and if you find any issue(s), then replace it immediately
• Install any standard Anti-virus program and run a full scan of your system. After that, delete all the malicious files found by the Anti-virus software
• Go to your BIOS settings and set everything to default by pressing F10 Key. For the time being, you only have to set the boot order of your hard disk at first.

Option 2:

• Insert the Windows 7 CD on the CD Drive and follow the steps shown on the setup screen,
• Press the button 'R', when Windows ask you to choose on 'Welcome to Setup' screen
• You will get the CMD prompt window after entering the admin password and pressing '1' key
• Type 'Fixboot' and then a pop up window will appear asking about confirmation and you have to press key 'Y'
• Restart the system

The second option will repair & replace all the deleted or modified system files and will finally place you to the desktop screen without any error messages.

If you are still seeing this error after restarting the system, then I would suggest you can install a fresh copy of Windows on your local drive. But doing this may result in temporary data lost, and you have to take help from any data recovery specialist to recover them back.

Posted in: BOOTMGR, BOOTMGR is missingm, Recover from BOOTMGR error