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After doing some maintenance work on the inside of my computer, I turned it back on and got the very unhelpful message from Vista:

BOOTMGR is missing

Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

Well, when I pressed the keys to restart, the error comes right back.  It’s an endless loop.  What the heck does this message mean anyway?  I found the problem and was able to fix it.  Read on for the solution.

Now there could be many causes of this error.  It could be corrupt files on your Vista installation.  I first reached for the Vista DVD and rebooted the computer and ran the repair tool from the DVD.  But the repair utility could not find my Vista installation.  The repair program offered no other helpful information.

Before this problem surfaced, I had opened the computer for an unrelated issue.

My computer had been overheating so I got into the case and removed the dust bunnies from the CPU heat sink.  That solved the overheating issue but then the computer would no longer boot up Vista.

The problem:  the hard drive SATA cable came unplugged!

Buried behind cables is a hard drive.

Anyone else notice how flimsy the connection is between a SATA connector and a hard drive?  These connectors pop out of my hard drives way too easily.  Just a small bump on one of the cables and the hard drive is no longer connected to the motherboard.

The solution to this problem was simply to reconnect the SATA cable.

After powering the computer back up, Vista loaded up just fine.

Another BOOTMGR problem

Hours later, the problem resurfaced.  I was running the Abit uGuru program to monitor the temperature of my CPU.  When I closed uGuru, Vista gave me the blue screen of death.  That was strange, especially since the CPU temp was normal.  When I rebooted the computer, the BOOTMGR is missing error came back.  I was disheartened by that but quickly fixed it.

I opened the case back up and disconnected my RAID drives by pulling the SATA connectors out of them.  Rebooted the computer.  The error was again gone and Vista loaded up, however I was missing my RAID drives.

Turned off the computer and reconnected the SATA cables to the RAID hard drives.  Powered up the computer.  Vista loaded up fine with no errors and the RAID storage was back.  All problems were resolved.

I made this fix a couple days ago and have had no more problems.  All of the BOOTMGR errors for me appear to be related to the SATA connections between the motherboard and hard drives.  Now that the connections are good, the computer is running well.

Conclusion

If you have the missing BOOTMGR message and you recently did some work inside your computer case, you might check that your hard drive is still connected to the motherboard.