Boot manager and Operating system missing

Can someone please help me???? I am about to throw everything out the window!!!

I have a Gateway ML6732 that is running Windows Vista home premium, not sure what other info you need.

2 days ago I tried to do a restore to about 2 weeks ago, my system shut down after about 6 hours of this running, when I booted back up I received the blue screen error that was stop: c1f5. With this error I could not boot up at all, it would try to load at the windows screen for about 15 seconds then I would get teh blue screen everytime, not matter how I tried to load: regular, safe mode, or w/ my recovery discs. I researched this & found the best thing to do was to get a Windows 7 recovery disc, which I did.

This at least got me to the restore screens. Tried every single thing on there & nothing worked. So finally tried Gatewasy recover to original system (not happy I would lose all my files, but at this point did not really care). Once his ran I restarted then I get a black screen w/ this message "bootmgr missing".

Still can not get the system to load or even try w/ out the Windows 7 disc (not even w/Vista discs). If I used the Windows 7 disc it will take me to the system repair screen w/ all of the options, but it does not give me an operating system listed. And somewhere along all these lines it told me the operating system was missing.

I have spent about 20 of the last 24 hours trying to fix this, but I am lost now. Can someone please help????

 

It is likely your hard drive has failed.

 

From what I have read that c1f5 error is rather persistent. The HD may not be bad but might need a complete reformat or a total wipe using a HD utility. Do your Gateway CDs have all the OS information on them or do they use a recovery partition for some of the information?

Using the Win7 disc, try startup repair (from the list of 5 options) twice and reboot from the Win7 disc again and see if it finds the OS. It is possible that a Win7 RE CD won't work properly on a Vista computer. I've seen posts where it stated you had to have the correct one for your OS but have never tested using the wrong CD. You may need to try a Vista RE CD.

If no good then get to the 5 recovery options and choose command prompt. Type diskpart at the prompt and hit <enter>.
Then at the diskpart prompt type list volume and let me know what you see.