netbook not booting

My Acer Aspire One netbook is suddenly refusing to boot-up. When I power on the only message I get is: BOOTMGR is missing Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart When I do that it just goes back to the same message. I don't have any recovery disks for it, whether that would help or not. It runs Windows XP. Any suggestions for what I can do? Thanks.

Check your Bios/CMOS (also referred to as Start Up settings) if the machine is attempting to boot from Optical Drive, change the Boot order to start from Hard Drive first. Plus remove any disks and/or USB memory devices before attempting to Boot. Your problem statement is confusing. You state that the machine is running Windows XP ??? BOOTMGR issues apply to Windows 7 and Windows Vista operating systems only. Windows XP does not utilize BOOTMGR. The equivalent function in Windows XP is NTLDR.

Yes, it's definitely operating with XP. Going inside the boot menu, I notice that the F12 Boot menu (whatever the F12 Boot menu is _ I haven't got a clue) is "disabled". But it wont allow me to change it, anyway. Neither will it allow changes to the Boot priority order.

Managed to get into the e-recovery settings and fixed it. I think the reason it was displaying a message that should only have been displayed with a windows 7 system is because when I tried to update the drivers manually from the Acer webpage, I downloaded the Windows7 ones instead of the XP ones, and that's what probably stuffed my computer.

Thanks for letting us know the solution to your mystery. Makes sense. But I've got to admit I've never stumbled across that situation of errors before. Good Work!