Missing boot manager

[brooksinn]

HP Pavillion dv4 (4 meg ram, 250 g HD,  Windows Vista Home Prem. sp1, 64 bit 2.hz)

I used the original HP recovery CD to restore my HP pavillion to its original state and after its last reboot in says "missing boot manager" press ctrl/alt/del to restart. this just returns to this screen.
I called HP and they had me reload the recovery CD again. I got the same response. they then told me my hard drive was bad, and had me reboot to the bios and run a hard drive test. It was just fine. They then told me the problem was in the motherboard and they would send me a box to return and repair the laptop under warranty.

I believe the problem is or was the recovery disk but they said no. My laptop worked fine, I just wanted to go back to the out of the box configuration.

[killerb255]

They could be right or they could be wrong.

Missing boot manager in Vista/7 is similar to missing NTLDR in XP.  It could be a bad hard drive, a corrupt boot sector, or a number of other things.

Try this:

1) Borrow someone's Vista or 7 PC, preferably one with at least a CD burner.
2) Burn a copy of Windows RE by going into Start -> All Programs -> Maintenance -> Create a System Repair Disk.
3) Follow instructions/wizards.
4) Boot to your computer from the disc you created.
5) Select "Repair my computer."  Usually, this will automatically repair a jacked-up BCD database and allow you to boot up again...