Disk Boot Failure - Vista

[winston856]

Alright, I know this is an easy one and I've remedied the situation before by unplugging all HDDs except the one I was installing on.

So I've got my 150GB raptor with two partitions, and 2x320 Seagates, all SATA.

Formatted and partitioned the raptor then installed Vista, when I rebooted and took the DVD out of the drive I get the DISK BOOT FAILURE crap.

However if the DVD's in the drive and it's set to boot from CD rom in the bios, Vista starts up fine. Yes the BIOS sees all the HDDs just fine.

I'm sure this is just a problem with Windows not seeing something correctly but I'd like to know how to fix it in a civilized manor without reinstalling with all my drives unplugged.

Nothing is broken, all these drives work perfectly, what can I do?

 

[winston856]

I rebooted and put the Vista DVD in and it said their were no problems with the boot. But in the text it gave me it looked like it was booting to the E:\ drive which is my empty 320GB.

I need it to boot to my C:\ where windows is installed on my raptor! How can i change it?

 

[winston856]

Alright here's some more info to help you help me.

The D:\ Drive is suppose to be empty with nothing on it, but for some reason it's part of the system and I think it's trying to boot off that drive. I tried out VistaBoot Pro but it said it couldn't run properly because windows Vista was either not installed, or I have an "irregular drive configuration."

Can anybody shed some light on this? Google isn't helping much.

 

[zacdl]

Im in a similar situation my self... I have two drives, I installed Vista on one, but it stuck boot files and items like the Recycle Bin on the other. Go figure. It won't let me do anything to that drive now because it is a "system" volume.

 

[H-street]

just thinking out loud..

have you tried using your bios' boot menu..

on mine youjust hit esc and then you get to select which HD you boot from..


i have a mix of SATA and IDE HD's, if my bios resets i usually have to manually select again which drive to boot from..

 

[msny]

Alright, I know this is an easy one and I've remedied the situation before by unplugging all HDDs except the one I was installing on.

So I've got my 150GB raptor with two partitions, and 2x320 Seagates, all SATA.

Formatted and partitioned the raptor then installed Vista, when I rebooted and took the DVD out of the drive I get the DISK BOOT FAILURE crap.

However if the DVD's in the drive and it's set to boot from CD rom in the bios, Vista starts up fine. Yes the BIOS sees all the HDDs just fine.

I'm sure this is just a problem with Windows not seeing something correctly but I'd like to know how to fix it in a civilized manor without reinstalling with all my drives unplugged.

Nothing is broken, all these drives work perfectly, what can I do?

Whats the drive order in BIOS set to?

 

[bbz_Ghost]

You should have installed Vista with nothing but the Raptor in the machine, which you basically understood going in because of the comment you made about unplugging all your drives.

To get Vista installed, you just need the Raptor and the DVD drive, that's it. Once it's up and running, you can add as much as you wish and work with the drive letters afterwards. Avoid Primary partitions except the one for the system drive, it'll just pooch the drive letters even more across the board. Yes, you can fix them with Disk Management, but with one Primary and the rest all Extended/Logical, it won't ever be something you have to "fix" in the first place.

 

[winston856]

You should have installed Vista with nothing but the Raptor in the machine, which you basically understood going in because of the comment you made about unplugging all your drives.

To get Vista installed, you just need the Raptor and the DVD drive, that's it. Once it's up and running, you can add as much as you wish and work with the drive letters afterwards. Avoid Primary partitions except the one for the system drive, it'll just pooch the drive letters even more across the board. Yes, you can fix them with Disk Management, but with one Primary and the rest all Extended/Logical, it won't ever be something you have to "fix" in the first place.

That's exactly what I did. I got fed up and just unplugged everything but the raptor....

It's a bunch of horse hockey, Microsoft had 5 years to build a new bootloader instead of keeping the crappy old one that can't even see where the OS root is very intelligently!

I just wanted to find a way to do it normally so I wouldn't have to open my case up. I should not have to unplug all my drives just so windows installs properly.

Anyway, thanks for your help guys. It was appreciated.