Vista Boot Problem

Well, I was messing around with Vista on one of my comps today. I had XP installed on the comp, and I made a 2nd partition for Vista, and copied all my documents over from the XP partition to the Vista partition, then deleted the XP partition and resized the Vista partition to take up the whole HDD. Well, I of course forgot to make the Vista partition active before installing Vista, so the bootloader was installed to the XP partition... and got deleted along with the XP partition. So I booted up the Vista DVD again and tried running the startup repair program. No good. So I rebooted to the DVD and ran the console and did the bootrec.exe repair procedures. Reboot and I'm able to get into Vista. Alright! But it takes about 10 minutes to login, and once I get in, I have to ctrl+alt+del to start the task manager and manually start explorer.exe, after which it tells me there was an error loading my profile (obviously ) and a temporary profile has been created. At this point, the speed of the computer is about normal, but most programs (and by programs I mean built in windows features that I was hoping I could use to fix this) don't work and give a file not found error.

A lot of the file not found errors (and probably explorer.exe not loading and everything else) seem to be due to the drive letter having changed from C: to D:, so changing the drive letter of the partition back to C: might fix it, but... unless there's a way to do that from the command line or something, I may be out of luck, since Partition Magic was on my XP partition, and none of the snap-ins for MMC work so I can't change the drive letter in there.

once you load the os onto the D Drive your screwed. just backup all your stuff to an external drive( or dvd if its not that much) and format and reload the os. at this point in the life of vista on your computer its best and easiest to just reload and save yourself the headache of doing it later before you get it to adjusted to your style.

Time for a fresh install. Back up your stuff using what/however you can (read: pop the drive into a not-screwed computer), then pop the drive back in, blast it using the Vista installer, and start again.

Captain Newbie said:

Back up your stuff using what/however you can (read: pop the drive into a not-screwed computer),

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The funny thing about that is... it's a laptop

Luckily, copying is one of the few things on that system that still works. I was able to get all my files put onto my external HDD and I'm reinstalling Vista now.

I was hoping to get it fixed without having to reinstall, but... oh well

Soichiro said:

The funny thing about that is... it's a laptop

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So?

Screwdriver and adapters, please. It's fairly trivial.