What is BOOTMGR and why does it keep going missing? Next, Bad to Worse.

I've just had a recurring problem go from REALLY annoying to intolerably vexing. I hope someone can help. Some background follows. About two months ago I built a new system. Here is a list of the major components and the set up:
MoBo - Gigabyte 970A-UD3
CPU - AMD Phenom II X4 955 Processor, 3.2 GHz
RAM - 12 GB Kinston Hyper (KHX1600C9D2)
GPU - EVGA GeForce 9500GT 512MB DDR2
OS - MS Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit installed on:
SSD - Crucial M4, 64 GB (CT064M4SSD2)
Storage - Western Digital 2X 1TB SATA3 (WD1002FAEX) partioned with
500GB Mirrored RAID1 (465.66GB)
1TB Stripped RAID0 (931.32GB)

The system ran fine for about the first month. Then I started getting random crashes (blue screen, black screen, auto-reboot, whatever), the common factor being that after BIOS POST and RAID screens passed, the message BOOTMGR missing, Hit CNTRL ALT DEL would be dislayed. So, I pulled out my handy Windows installation disc, booted into the Windows Recovery Environment and selected repair Windows installation, etc. Sometimes it would find the Windows installation and allow me to select the "repair startup" option. It would chug along an then display a message somehow indicating to me that it didn't find any problems. Sometime reboot would work other times I would still get BOOTMGR is missing; Yet other times it could not find the windows installation and this option would be grayed out. I would then have to select command prompt and then run BootRec.exe. Here I tried the various options, rather mindlessly because I didn't really understand what it was doing with the various options, i was just following the "cookbook" instructions. Well, eventually the systems would reboot all the way to the Windows logon screen. Things would be fine for a day or two, but eventually the next reboot led to the same BOOTMGR missing ordeal. Followed by me exercising various Windows RE options until eventually successful boot to OS. After a week or more of this it was getting really annoying. This is the definition of insanity, right - Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? Anyway, i was wondering what the heck is a BOOTMGR anyway? And why does it keep going missing on my system?:confused I started looking through the forum threads to see if anyone had a similar problem, but couldn't really find a good match. Mostly repeated instructions to do what I had already been doing. I was beginning to think maybe I had a flakey SSD, because that seems to be a fairly common general problem that, in my mind anyway, could plausibly explain the symptons. I was just about to post my own plea for help on the forum when things got markedly worse.

I walked into the room this morning to find a blue screen crash... Windows had to shut down, blah, blah blah. Went through the whole rigmarole and eventually got back into Windows, but now there was more serious problem. Windows does not recognize my RAID1 mirror partition as being formatted. It still sees the striped RAID0 partition, where all my applications are installed, just fine. But the mirror partition, where all my data files and "My documents" are stored is displayed as having a "RAW" file system. ARGH!!! :cry So now in addition to my original problem I have to ask for advice on the best way to recover the lost partition. And in what order should I attack these?

By the way, shame on me - I hadn't yet created a mirror or back up files of my data files. Two brand-new 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black installed into my NAS device, but not yet formatted and partitioned. Like I said shame on me. Any way, any helpful insight would be really appreciated. Thanks.

 

You failed to mention your Windows version; Windows 7 / Vista are using a different boot manager than previous Windows versions.

 

Didn't forget to post which version of Windows. It's listed there:
OS - MS Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit...

 

Sorry for that; I didn't notice it inbetween the hardware specs.

What is the boot sequence in your BIOS? This error can occur if the HD is not the first in the boot sequence, and some other media is in the other drive(s).

 

Sorry for the delay in responding to your advice. I've been wicked busy at work. Anyway, I was wondering about the effect of other media, because it seemed this trouble may have started, coincidentally, when I had few USB flash drives plugged in during boot up. But after seeing some hints of his problem on the forum, I took out all the thumb drives and still had the problem.

So, to answer your question, I went into my BIOS and found it was configured as follows:
- First boot device - CD ROM
- Second boot device - Hard Disk
- Third boot device - USB-FDD
This seems OK, but I think that your suggestion did lead me to the problem - Under the hard disk boot priority, somehow the settings were changed to look at my storage drives first, then my boot drive. I recall that a few weeks after my initial build, I switched around which drives were physically plugged into which SATA ports on the MoBo. This may have confused the BIOS. The timing may be right for when the problem first started appearing.

I have moved the boot drive to the top of the hard disk boot priority list and afterward the system booted just fine - first try. I'll let you know if the problem returns. Otherwise, thanks a bunch for your advice. Now the follow-up question is this, with that boot priority setting in the BIOS its a wonder the system ever booted at all.

 

Using Western Digital Black drives (or green, or blue) are a big nono in RAID environments.... I learned the hard way until I did some research. :-o

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers...ion-(wd-blue,-wd-green-and-wd-black)-and-raid