Vista not bootable.

Anominity · 21 Nov 2007 at 12:19

Hey guys,

Just installed new Motherboard and processor so thought i would reinstall everything while i was at it.

Ok, so i already had Vista on my one drive (Lets call it C

So i reinstalled it on the other (hmm shall we call it D:?

) with the intention of formatting C: once i got booted in on the D:.

Installed fine, but now when i try to format C: (Which is now actually D: after the reinstall) It says it is unable to.
I think ok, i can deal with that.

Now however, whenever i boot up, if i do not have the Vista DVD in the drive, it is non bootable (Non system Disk or Disk error type message.)

Any suggestions on how to resolve this?

If i need to make it any clearer let me know, I know when i say somethings it makes sense to me but not to others

Cake · 21 Nov 2007 at 12:25

Make sure jumpers are set properly on your hard disks. If it's not that, check your boot.ini (don't know if Vista uses that, but XP does so I'm just assuming here).

poggy · 21 Nov 2007 at 12:33

Have you checked your bios to see which hard drive is the first one to boot up?

****Edit
Also if you can't manage to format D: (your old C

then start up with the vista dvd and go through the steps as you would if you wanted to install vista again but after it's finished re-formating the drive stop before it installs the files ****

uv · 21 Nov 2007 at 12:34

Vista put the boot loader for D:/ on C:/

It has a really annoying habit of putting the bootloader on a drive other than the boot drive, this happened to me a few times, until I started disabling PATA drives to install to my Raptor - Vista seems to put the loader onto the first availalable drive, and IDE drives came before my SATA drives.

You'll be able to fix it using the Vista DVD, I assume it'll have a bootloader-fixer thing on it?

Anominity · 21 Nov 2007 at 12:47

Cake said:
Make sure jumpers are set properly on your hard disks. If it's not that, check your boot.ini (don't know if Vista uses that, but XP does so I'm just assuming here).

I did do a search for boot.ini (including system and hidden files) but it came up blank, so i dunno, either Vista does not use it, or i made a duff install.

Jumpers on drives as far as i am aware are set to Cable Select.

I did run a repair (chkdsk /f and /r) this did not resolve the problem.

I have not tried formatting the drive using the Vista installer, even so, will this help with making it boot?