In order to improve the attitude control performance of the hypersonic reentry vehicle(HRV) subjected to total failures of certain actuators, the paper proposes a sliding mode fault-tolerant control(FTC) scheme which is relied on an adaptive disturbance observer(ADO) and reference vector generator(RVG). Firstly, an adaptive disturbance observer is designed to estimate the system perturbations with overshoot attenuation. Then, a back-stepping based sliding mode controller is developed combined with a reference vector generator together with the estimated perturbations, which improves superior transient performances for state tracking. Simulation results obtained on the nonlinear model of the hypersonic vehicle show that the proposed techniques can allow a faster response and minimize the overshoots compared to the linear conventional disturbance observers based sliding mode controller.