I got a virus on my Vista. I saved all of my important files and decided to do one of those 'Full Destructive Recovery' thingies. The recovery disc was faulty, and I was left with a laptop without a boot manager.

Now I'm not entirely tech savie, but I figure that's not good.

I've since tried installing a couple of different Linux distros, as well as Windows 7, but all I get with any of them is 'BOOTMGR IS MISSING'.

I do get the option of entering the BIOS menu before then, but that doesn't do much to help me (Beyond telling it to load from discs in preference to the hard drive.

So what now, pretty please? Is it possibly the case that the distros I have tried (Linux Mint, Fedora and OpenSUSE) have lacked a boot manager but I can get one with other distros, or does the problem arise before my computer even tries to read the discs?

I did make recovery DVDs for my Vista, but while they successfully killed my old OS, they pretty much left me where I am now.

Any solution will do. I've backed up all the files I wanted to save.

Thank you for your time.

Do you get this message when you try to boot from the install CD/DVD, or after an install when you try to boot?
If you can boot to a live cd, open a terminal and type: and post the results here.

I hate Vista with a passion, but the error message you are seeing is part of the Vista bootup:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...windows-vista/

Be aware that if you're having this much trouble fixing a boot error you may struggle for a while installing Linux. You'll need to get out of the Windows mindset.