Recurring corrupt boot sector

P

Papa Geo

Weaksauce
Joined
Apr 28, 2005
Messages
93
Wasn't sure which section to post this, but just swapped motherboards to evga 750i ftw, reformatted and reinstalled vista 64-bit on my raid 0 drives, and since then have experienced multiple boot sector failures. Probably 3 since I installed the OS last night. All have been around nforce driver updates, but was worried that one of my drives may be failing. any suggestions?

Edit: Solved. Swapping SATA channels between my 2 raided drives and my backup assigned the RAIDed drives as C:\. Now no more boot issues.

Edit 2: To go into more detail, it appears as though my mobo assigns (and reassigns upon boot) the drive letters, so using diskpart in vista recovery disk to reassign drive letters is useless. However, changing the boot priority of the drives in the bios does seem to work. Changing the hard drive I wanted to boot from to the LOWER priority (below the other on the list) would assign it as C, and assign the others up from there. Weird, don't know if it's a BIOS bug or not.
 
What kind of drives are they? I would check with the manufacturer to see if there's a utility you can run on them to check for errors just to rule that out.
 
good call. One's a seagate 7200.10 320 gb, and the other's a maxtor rebranded 7200.10. I'll have to run the utility to make sure the drives are ok. Another weird side note, when I switched mobos and rebuilt the raid setup/formatted the drives/deleted mbr/ when the pc booted it would see 2 OSs. Running bootrec under vista repair disc would even see 2 OS's (I reformatted/reinstalled twice and it happened both times). I installed a boot management software (winbootpro i think?) and was able to remove the 2nd option.
 
RAID 0 is something I just don't mess with, let alone with two different brands of drives. Just a personal preference of course. Two prompts for the same OS when you boot? Normally I just edit the boot.ini if that happens and remove one of the lines. But it looks like Vista no longer uses a boot.ini in the same fashion anymore. I believe it's called BCDEdit.exe now.
 
So, I've realized that vista only boots with the installation disk in the drive. It's not that I keep getting corrupt boot sectors, it's that I can't seem to add one to begin with. I have tried rebuilding the bcd, but no OS is found. Following instructions found through Microsoft support, I deleted the BCD and then rebuilt it, which did find an OS and said it rebuilt. That however does not fix the problem. When i run bootrec /scanos again, it still finds 0 installs. When i delete and rebuild my OS, it shows up on drive D:\. Any suggestions?
 
Writing the last post gave me an idea, and I've found my solution. For whatever reason the order of my SATA drives mattered to windows, and since I had 2 raided and 1 for backup, it would assign that drive (backup) as C. Flipping the sata cables around and Vista boots fine without any startup/MBR repairs needed.
 
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