Boot Error

My mother has absolutely no faith in my computer skills. I'm the one with the screwed up computer, and I'll pitch in any info I have. I have/had two operating systems, Windows Vista 32 bit Home Edition, and Linux BackTrack 4 (Which was installed to a 4GB flash drive, but saves all excess data to MyBook.) After Windows started booting with only the cursor and a black screen, I popped in my Vista disk to see if I could repair it, and it claimed my main drive (499 GB) was 498.5 GB free. This was the drive where Vista was installed, along with all my stuff. I hit "Repair," and none of the tools can find any issues, or they don't result in anything helpful (to my knowledge.)
As for the "GRUB error 21" issue, that's my flash drive. The drive holds GRUB, my operating system loader, and my computer won't be able to load an operating system without the presence of the drive. I had been meaning to get around to putting it on my C: drive, but I never got around to it.

 

Re: Windows Vista Boot Manager Is Missing

Hi,

I haven't had Linux installed for a few years so I don't want to mess your GRUB up (although I think that is fixable should it happen).

You mother said that without the flash drive connected she still got a Grub error which would imply that some part of GRUB is installed on the Vista HD.

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She also said she got a login prompt for backtrack. If you login to backtrack can you see your Vista files? Let me know the answer before using partition wizard.

If the Vista files are not there then I would suggest downloading a bootable copy of Partition Wizard and burning the ISO to a blank CD/DVD as an image file using imgburn or similar burning software. Then after booting from the disc you could highlight the HD probably disk 0 and select Partition Recovery from the left pane. Let it run. When it gives you the list of partitions it finds double click the Vista partition to see if it can find your old files.
If the old files are all listed then you would select all the partitions in the list and hit Finish to recover them. Then in the main Window, double check everything looks correct and hit the Apply button to finalize the result. [When looking at the list of partitions you want to make sure they are all current and not from long ago formatting. They will probably all look familiar.] http://www.partitionwizard.com/help/partition-recovery.html

This would bring back your files if they are missing and then we have to figure out how to get the partition to boot which will probably be the same as my first post in this thread.