Bootmgr is missing for Windows XP

Question

I know that there are so many posts on this subject but none of them worked for me.

I have Ubuntu on my machine and I would like to install Windows XP. As my CD/DVD reader does not work, I made a bootable USB from an ISO image using UNETBOOTIN. But when I try to boot in through the USB drive it says "BOOTMGR is Missing". I have searched a lot but could not find any solution to it.

My hard drive uses the Ext4 filesystem and my bootable drive uses NTFS. I have set the boot sequence as USB Drive in BIOS.

Answer 1

It is better to install Ubuntu after Windows.

Why you are keeping your Hard Drive as ext4? It is better if you can keep the area to be used for Windows installation either non-formatted or as NTFS as you boot drive is.

Answer 2

The below information is from here.

The first that we need to do is to create new partition for Windows and format it to NTFS. Exact steps to accomplish this depend on your HDD partition table e.g. there is one large ext3/ext4 partition for Ubuntu or there are several partitions for various distributions or mount points. Anyway you should use partition manager to create and/or format NTFS partition. You can use gparted. It is graphical and it just works (use ‘sudo apt-get install gparted‘ if you run Ubuntu/Debian).

Second you should backup your MBR record and restore it after Windows installation that silently erases existing bootloader and installs windows one, use “dd if=/dev/sda of=/mbr.bin bs=446 count=1” to save MRB into mbr.bin file and “dd if=/media/sda/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1” to restore it from file to HDD.

To sum everything up here are the steps:

1. BACKUP ALL YOUR DATA!
2. Create NTFS partition using gparted.
3. Backup MBR using dd command e.g. “dd if=/dev/sda of=/mbr.bin bs=446 count=1″ (/dev/sda means your HDD).
4. Boot Windows installation CD and install it onto newly created NTFS partition.
5. Boot into Linux live CD e.g. Ubuntu Live CD.
6. Restore MBR using dd e.g. “dd if=/media/sda/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1″.
7. Reboot.
8. Select Ubuntu in grub menu and boot it.
9. Setup grub for Windows booting.

If after formatting the partition in NTFS mode it still giving the error then there is any problem with MBR on USB. Use wintoflash to make it bootable.

Also read this discussion where user overcome to make an USB to bootable.

Answer 3

You cannot install Windows XP this way, see Installing Windows XP from USB pen drive for a working solution. It however probably requires a working Windows system to create the files on the pen drive.