Multi Boot/MBR help

I

ImAgainstIt

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 16, 2008
Messages
155
Hi, I've had vista on one drive for a while now and decided to install it on another drive, both on the same computer but separate drives, drive 1 and drive 2, I installed vista on drive 2 from drive 1 and drive 1 has the MBR/BCD for both Drive 1 and Drive 2, however I can't boot up Drive 2 without Drive 1 being plugged in, how can I fix this ?

I've placed in my DVD, did the RE/CMD and did bootrec /fixmbr and bootrec /fixboot.

Thanks alot for any help.
 
What did exactly happen?

Anyway, if everything else fails, you can always go the brute force way:
- Connect both drives and boot to drive 1.
- Backup all data (images, documents, movies, downloads, ...) you need to keep from drive 2 to drive 1 or another drive or optical media.
- Disconnect all drives except drive 2. Install (fresh install after deleting partition) Vista on it and complete installation.
- Reconnect drive 1. Now, when you start the PC, you can use F12 to bring up the boot device selection and select drive 1 or 2.
 
It wont work unless you install the Vista boot files etc on the 2nd drive which is what you specifically didnt do.
Also as Windows thinks it will be drive D: (or not C: ), you cannot boot with it as any other drive letter than it originally used or it will not work.
I recommend a new OS install as it will be the least trouble.

To prevent this happening in the future, install the OS with only the 1 hard drive plugged in.
Once installed, plug other drives in and change the boot drive in the CMOS (or F12 method as mentioned above).
 
Well that's just f'n ridiculous.

thanks for the help.

MrF said:
What did exactly happen?

Anyway, if everything else fails, you can always go the brute force way:
- Connect both drives and boot to drive 1.
- Backup all data (images, documents, movies, downloads, ...) you need to keep from drive 2 to drive 1 or another drive or optical media.
- Disconnect all drives except drive 2. Install (fresh install after deleting partition) Vista on it and complete installation.
- Reconnect drive 1. Now, when you start the PC, you can use F12 to bring up the boot device selection and select drive 1 or 2.
Click to expand...

My primary drive was dying and I needed to do another install, not thinkign about it I installed vista from inside windows than doing it from boot.
 
Nenu said:
Also as Windows thinks it will be drive D: (or not C: ), you cannot boot with it as any other drive letter than it originally used or it will not work.
Click to expand...

I don't see any problems, if a bcd storage and boot files are created on that drive. Drive letters have very little to do with this.
 
pallesen said:
I don't see any problems, if a bcd storage and boot files are created on that drive. Drive letters have very little to do with this.
Click to expand...

His boot drive (on drive 1) is C:
This means his Windows (on drive 2) is D: or another drive letter.

If he now wants to boot from drive 2 it will likely be allocated drive C: which will render Windows useless as it will be expecting itself to be on drive D: (or whatever it was allocated previous).
I've done it, tried to fix it, not worth it.
 
The drive letter is stored in the registry. So whatever drive you boot from/the number of drives seen won't change it.

I've also been there, done it, and it worked just fine.
 
pallesen said:
The drive letter is stored in the registry. So whatever drive you boot from/the number of drives seen won't change it.

I've also been there, done it, and it worked just fine.
Click to expand...

You take the op through it, I'll get some popcorn.
 
It shouldn't be much more complicated than what MrF has already said about the startup repair. The question is where it went wrong.
 
The new drive is still C:\.

Also MrF, I just don't want to do another install for a while as installing sp1 and 200+meg of updates, downloading all my drivers, all my software and all that again takes way too long to do.
 
No, I unplugged all my drives except for that one, set the proper boot priority, did the startup repair. it rebooted and then I got the no bootable media error
 
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