Help: BOOTMGR is Missing error

I have a HP laptop that is about a year old. It has Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows XP Home installed on it. The vista boot manager deals with swapping between OS's. Today, I saw a message that freaked me out. At boot-up, before the computer got to the select OS screen, it put a message:

BOOTMGR is missing,
press any key to restart.

If I press a key it just puts another identical message on the screen. I've had this occur 4 times now, the first two were right in a row, then my computer started normally twice, then another 2 times in a row i saw the same message, now it started again normally. I have also been experiencing frequent system freezes. If this happens again soon I'll take a picture and upload it. Right now I'm furiously backing up data.

I have currently running on my system Eset Nod 32 antivirus and Comodo Firewall Pro among a few other things.

Are there any tools I should run to check if my hard drive might be going out?
Any other suggestions on what else I should do to check my system?

Thank you all for any input/suggestions and help.

 

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/wind...ing-error-while-trying-to-boot-windows-vista/

 

Thank you for your reply but I've already seen this page through google. I really want to hold off on "fixing" this "problem" until I'm sure that its a problem that can be fixed via the vista startup recovery.

As noted above, I can still get my computer to boot if i shut it down and try it again when I see this message. My basic logic skills tell me that the BOOTMGR file is STILL ON THE DISK if it boots at all any of the times i try to boot, but for some reason at seemingly random boots the computer fails to detect the file.

 

Try to run a sfc /scannow and a chkdsk - a bit complicated with 2 systems installed, I realize..

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392/en-us
I'm no Vista expert, but maybe that will help....

Good luck!