[dwnelsonjr]

I know this question has been answered many times already, but after looking at about a dozen threads I didnt find any that would help me so I figured I would save my self some time and just as this question again. I created a 2nd partition on my hard drive and was going to image vista SP1 on it so I could see how bad it FUBAR's my computer. Well, when I created said partition and restarted my computer to use WINPE and ImageX, I get an error message that says "BOOTMGR is missing, press CTRL + ALT + DEL to restart" Which of course just starts this vicious cycle all over again. So I got out my handy dandy windows vista installation CD, courtesy of DELL, and popped it into the CD drive. So I go the usual procedure of booting from the CD, but then I get an error message saying "CDBOOT: Cannot boot from CD Code : 5, BOOTMGR is missing" Grrr....

[managed]

How did you create the 2nd partition ?
Is it before or after the original partition ?
What OS is on the drive already ?
How were you going to run WinPE and ImageX ?

That's a Vista error message, have you installed Vista in the past ?

[dwnelsonjr]

The computer already had windows vista on it, I created the partition using DISKPART, this happened after I created the partition and I was told to boot from the WINPE/IMAGEX CD, so that's what I was trying to do, then my computer took a crap. I've only been working with vista for the past month, before that I had no experience with it at all.

[managed]

I see, looks like you have somehow deleted Bootmgr or perhaps altered the MBR, that error message could mean either.

I don't understand why you can't boot from the optical disk though.

Is it a CD or DVD ?

I'm wondering if it's some sort of special Dell disk and you have a recovery partition on the hard drive, if it is a CD AFAIK it's too small to contain Visa.

What model is this computer ?