HP Recovery: "BOOTMGR is missing"

[cbrain]

Hey,

I've got a HP laptop which has been running Ubuntu for the past couple of months, but I wanted to reformat it to Windows since my PC is broken and I need to use it.

I booted up from the restore partition and thought it was a bit odd that it did the format/install in 3 seconds. Restarted, just comes up "BOOTMGR is missing". Booted up from a spare Vista disk, noticed that the recovery installer hadn't done anything with the partitions; I still had an ext4 and a swap partition. Got shot of these and made an NTFS partition in the free space. Tried to boot up from the restore partition again, same problem.

Anyone know how to fix it?

Thanks.

[duck]

Your restore partition is probably fucked, if you've got restore media now is the time to use it.

Seriously consider using vanilla install media instead though, you'll skip all the HP bloatware

[cbrain]

Sounds a good idea, reformatting now with my spare Vista disc using the OEM key on the side of the laptop (that shouldn't cause any problems should it?).

Thanks.