BOOTMGR image is corrupt





I bumped into a laptop that; after a hard disk check to see if the hard disk was bad using the Ultimate Boot CD (aka UBCD – a great tool by the way!).  I suspect the hard disk had bad sectors on it (as all hard drives do) but that some of the OS files were sitting on these sectors.  Thus, the system was having problems and after the diagnostics were run, I tried to boot the system and got this error:

BOOTMGR image is corrupt

or

File: \windows\system32\winload.exe status: 0xc0000221

This link had most of the fix although, watch out because if your OS isn’t on “c:” then it won’t work, THUS MY POST – to help those of you who aren’t too technical to figure it out ;-)

Dinesh was a big help though!

Link:  http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/104341-bootmgr-missing-fix.html

Note, look at what the wizard says your OS drive is, mine on the system I was working on was D: thus the commands you need to run in the tutorial aren’t going to start with “c:\…”, you do a “d:\…”.

Dinesh then said to change directory (cd) to your c:\boot directory.  The boot directory was MISSING on the system I was working on…thus, it won’t boot :-)

Do a:

mkdir d:\boot

If it exists you’ll simply get an error that it exists but again, mine didn’t.

Then run his commands after you cd into it:

bootrec /FixMbr
bootrec /FixBoot
bootrec /RebuildBcd

Now, one MORE command for you IF that doesn't work ;-)

bcdboot D:\Windows
* Hey!  Remember!  Your boot drive might not be "D:" like mine, just a friendly reminder.

When I got further into the process the first 3 commands from Dinesh moved me forward but then the system got to the second error about a missing or corrupt winload.exe file.

Once you get Windows back up you might STILL have some errors, you might then need to open a command prompt and type in "sfc /scannow" to fix any operating system level files.

Another reboot and all should be well.  Maybe do a disk check on it by right clicking the hard drive > properties > tools (I think it is) and then do a disk check.

*** Update ***

An informative update to the above which bailed me out!

The problem:

I had a 1TB "green drive" in a client server, no raid just a single drive.  I'm still working on the single drive problem BUT in the meantime I was able to use clonezilla and clone the partition from the 1TB disk over to an enterprise drive that's only 500 GB.  The main problem was Windows Backup - it won't restore just the "c:" partition to the damn disk with less space even though the partition is only something like 120 Gig.  I don't get it but whatever.  So I used clonezilla, copied over the 120 GB partition to the 500 GB disk.  It won't boot (see above "fix").  The extra step though is to mark the partition on the new disk as "active" using diskpart.  So - boot using the server CD you have, open the command prompt in the rescue options, then type in:  diskpart, then type in:  list disk, then:  select disk x, x = the number you see of your disk, then type in: select disk x, then: list partition, then: select partition x, then: active, then: exit and reboot!

Command set then is:

diskpart
list disk
select disk x
list partition
select partition
active
exit
...and reboot!

It should reboot and come up splendidly!