Hey guys. I got a Gateway Laptop in January, everything was working fine until one day I accidentally formatted it to FAT32 rather than my external one (for my PS3). After I formatted it back to NTFS I'd get an error saying BOOTMGR is missing. I checked if I had a CD included with the laptop from the store but nothing was there so I downloaded Windows Vista Ultimate. The install went fine and everything was working until I restarted the computer. It would go to the Gateway Recovery screen and it'd say that the Windows installed was different. I'm guessing Gateway is looking for a 32-bit operating system. Now my computer won't start and I have important data on my HDD so if anyone can help that'd be great!
The gateways have a recovery partition, go back in there and restore your computer back to it's original configuration. As the computer is booting up just keep hitting the F11 key and it should take you to the restore area and follow directions for your computer. If after you restore it and it still won't boot use your vista installation dvd to repair the bootloader. http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Recovering+the+Vista+Bootloader+from+the+DVD I would try that first before anything else. All the other options will require you to completely format all your partition on your hard drive (this will delete everything including the hidden recovery partitions). All your data is safe and you can easily recover it by slaving that drive into another computer and copying the data over.
First off, just wanted to say thanks for replying. That's the sort of advice I was looking for. I'm just scared to do anything to my HDD, but I'll give it a go and tell you how it went.
Alright, I guess you didn't understand what I wrote, but I don't need to click F11 because my computer boots to that automatically now and I get an error because the recovery won't work because I have Vista Ultimate instead of Home Basic now. Recovery disks don't work either because of that (64-bit and 32-bit).
