Automatically boots into Recovery Manager

[beetbast]

My brothers has a compaq laptop, a presario c700. I'm not sure what happened, but he said he can't boot into windows anymore. I booted it up and it went to the recovery manager, he didn't have any important files.. so I did a system restore and set it back to factory default. After I did that windows was back up again, but once I restart or shut off the laptop it automatically reboots into the recovery manager instead of windows. I've tried looking through the bios and nothing there that helps. How can I fix it so it boots off the windows partition and stops booting into the partition for the recovery manager.

 

[aford10]

Check the boot order in the BIOS. Check the boot.ini file in windows. Run msconfig and make sure normal boot mode is enabled.

 

[beetbast]

dvd drive set to boot first, hard drive after.. Won't load up to vista, can't run msconfig. It's booting into the recovery manager. Seems like it doesn't even try to boot from the windows partition and just keeps going to the recovery partition. I've tried setting it so the windows partition is the active one, but each time I boot same thing.. it boots in the the recovery partition and not the windows partition.

However, if I do a system recovery again.. It will boot up into windows again, the first time. For some reason it'll boot into the windows partition the first time after it does the recovery... then im assuming something changes whenever I restart? I don't want to do a recovery every time just to get into vista.

Thinking about just deleting the recovery partition all together, but would prefer not to..

 

[aford10]

Set the hard drive as the first boot device. That is how I always have my PC's unless I need to boot off a different device. It reduces boot time as well.

 

[beetbast]

I've already tried that... but switched it back to the dvd to boot it up on linux to mess with it a little there.

 

[aford10]

Ok, let it boot into the recovery console. Use the fixboot and fixmbr commands.

 

[beetbast]

Thanks, finally got it fixed.. used the information from:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392

using the bootrec command with /fixmbr and /fixboot didn't help, but after rebuilding the bcd it seems to work fine now.

 

[Scott Arneman]

I feel like an idiot, but I had the same problem, and later realized I had a recovery disk in the cd/dvd drive, so each time the computer was restarted, it thought I wanted a system recovery.

I removed the disk, and voila, the computer booted up like normal.