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BOOTMGR is missing Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart on Windows 2008 R2

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There are a lot of things floating around about putting in different DVDs and running gparted and taking care of this issue in thousands of different ways. I’ve read all over the internet that there’s no option in Server 2008’s installation CD to actually repair. There’s also a lot of hoopla about having to use VMware Converter when you are working with a VM that’s giving you this error.

Here’s what to do if you your Windows 2008 R2 Server gives you the error Bootmgr is missing Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart:

  1. Either put in your Windows 2008 R2 CD or mount the ISO
  2. Boot to the CD and choose to Repair
  3. Go through all of the steps to get to the option to go to command prompt
  4. Enter said command prompt
  5. You’ll start at x:\sources\
  6. cd x:\sources\recovery
  7. run StartRep.exe
  8. This will start a repair. Let the repair continue until it is done.
  9. Run the repair again, even after a reboot and into the CD again if you need to.

It took two tries for my VM to finally start working. The two repairs were this simple. But I was done after that and went on my merry way. If you had to do something more than this I’d love to hear it. The only other issue I’ve seen that took more than this was when a drive lost its boot flag, which can be fixed with gparted.

Cheers!