Hay Guys, I have some Vista Horror I’m trying to deal with and I wonder if you might be able to help.
My friend has just got a new HP a6724c desktop computer with vista installed straight from the factory. He's had it literally for 2 days and then boot issues came up. At first he attempted to restore the system to factory default via HP's recovery manager software, but then it tried to start the process, he got an "error 1002. please contact HP" or something like that. Now, after that he gets the dreaded "bootmgr is missing" error at startup.
Now, currently, the only thing we can do is go into the bios, or go back into HP's recovery manager. From the recovery manager we can do harddisk checks (which completed successfully), do the system restore )which still give the "error 1002" everytime, or go into the command prompt. I tried to reformat the Hard Drive using a spar copy I have of Vista Home but I get the message A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disk, CD, DVD, or USB Flash Drive, please insert it now".
After snooping around google I found an explanation for this problem located here (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/itprovistasetup/thread/4d906f85-7650-4eff-8bd2-13ec2b0bd2ae/) . Only problem is this desktop is literally only 2 days old and he didn't get a chance to burn the recovery disks before this happened.
Now I’m wondering what are my options? I was thinking about disabling everything in the system bios, plug in a USB powered IDE optical drive and seeing if I can attempt to installation from that.
Does that sound feasible? Or should I just give up and call HP support and waste seven hours of my life before asking for a Restore Disk? Also returning it to the store is not an option.
Thanks for any help in advance.