Formatted HDD with Win7, now bootmgr is missing and nothing will boot!

[chocolategoddess]

Not sure what section to put this is. Could be anything!

 

I formatted a laptop's HDD the other day in Windows 7, put the drive back in the laptop, and then went to install Win XP. Thing is, it won't boot. I get 'BOOTMGR is missing. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart' no matter what I try. I've tried various CDs/DVDs, XP, 7, BartPE, Ubuntu ... nothing.

 

Googling just tells me to boot from DVD and fix it (useful). Someone suggested that it was defaulting to booting from the HDD each time and to remove it from the boot list altogether, but the BIOS doesn't offer that option.

 

All I can think is that Win7 messed it up somehow and I need to do some trickery to revive it, but I'm not sure what. Ideas?

 

Oh, and I can't try booting from USB. I seem singularly incapable of creating bootable USB pens for some reason.

[leco]

Long shot here - if you could plug it into a Win7 machine to format it did you change the jumper to slave maybe, rather than master?

[ChrisH]

have you tried BCEDIT from a win PE disc?

[Ric_]

If you boot off Vista/Win7 media, you can run the diagnostic tools section, get up a command prompt and run DISKPART which you can use to delete all the volumes. The just reboot and re-install XP.