BOOTMGR is missing

I get the above message on booting an HP 530 loaded with vista basic. It
belongs to the guy next door, he pulled a pendrive without releasing it in
software and off it went.
I have tried the recovery program booting from the HP vista disk provided
and also a vista boot disk downloaded from a help site with the same result,
no operating system is found and it does not find the C: drive.
I tried bootrec/fixboot and that said it was fixed but it still wouldnt boot
into vista giving the same message:
BOOTMGR is missing
press ctrl alt delete to restart
I am thinking about formatting the drive NTFS with an old XP disk and then a
clean install of vista onto the c:\ drive. Is this feasible?
Any other options?

If I click 'load drivers' it gives me anm explorer interface in which i can
naigate to the c:\ drive so it IS there. It has two windows folders, one
tagged as 'windows.old'. I tried renaming that one back to 'windows' and
tagging the other as old but this didnt work either.
Where exactly does the 'BOOTMGR' file go and how can i find and replace it
manually?

You might see if running a Startup Repair can allow it to fix the boot
file for you automatically.

My bootmgr is in the root of the C: drive.
It's marked as read only and hidden and it's 325 k/b.

yeah, reset the OS defaults with a reboot & F10, make sure C: is the boot
drive, then save, exit and back in business.

Happens some times with nasty software or hardware installs.
This is a COMMON problem. I can't believe I'm the 1st with the suggestion.

Have you actually verified that bootmgr is missing from the System
partition?
dir /ah

did you try
reset the OS defaults with a reboot & F10, make sure C: is the boot
drive, then save, exit and back in business ?

No I didn't, but then I am not the one with the problem.

Do you have a Vista CD?

Ok, here is the deal... I have tried everything in the world to get this thing (my laptop) working again. It is giving me the BOOTMGR is missing error. I cannot get to the gmd promt, i cannot get to the repair screen, this is all it is giving me. I can get the bios and setup menues, but there is nothing in there that helps me. CAN ANYONE HELP ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Boot from the Vista DVD-ROM and have it Repair your startup files.

If you have multiple hard disk drives in that laptop, be sure that your BIOS
is set to boot from the one you want to use for future reboots.

And, PLEASE don't tell us that you "have tried everything in the world"!
:>( First, we're sure it isn't true. Second, if you have already "tried
everything", then there's no sense in us offering any advice, is there?
:^{ But if you've "tried everything I can think of", maybe we can suggest
something you haven't thought of. ;^}