Help please ASAP??

I used to wonder why people were in such a hurry for help, now I understand.

I put my system into a new case tonight. Everything went great, system boots fine, sorta. It tells me in big letters BOOT FAILURE PLEASE INSERT SYSTEM DISK or some such nonsense, unless I plug in the PATA drive I removed from the system. The situation is this: I have XP running on the RAID drives, and an old 100GB PATA drive I installed the Vista upgrade disc on just to try. I can get to XP when the PATA drive is plugged in, but I don't want the darn thing any more.

I think Vista screwed with my boot.ini file when I installed it, because every time I boot, it says something about an older version of windows, and that's what I have to select to boot normally. Otherwise, it goes to Vista.

Here's my typed and possibly typoed boot.ini:

-------------

;
;Warning: Boot.ini is used on Windows XP and earlier operating systems.
;Warning: Use BCEDIT.exe to modify Windows Vista boot options.
;
[boot loader]
timeout=3
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /FASTDETECT

------------

Help???

I called Microsoft right after I posted this. I just got off the phone with them. They are calling me back on Monday. Ugh.

reformat the vista drive.

Download VistaBootPro http://www.vistabootpro.org/ run the program, and select the System Boot Loader button. There you get a choice of uninstalling the XP or Vista Bootloader. After you restore the XP bootloader you should be good to go.

I'll try that tonight. Hope it works, my cats have been eyeing the PATA drive and cable hanging out of the side of the case. They were taking turns laying down on the drive, it was nice and warm. Just a matter of time before they start chewing the cable.

Hint for most anyone installing windows on a raid. Unplug all PATA, external drives and even other internal sata drives when installing. Plug them back in when finished.

Windows almost never considers raid as the primary drive, even if you are installing to it.

Didn't work. System boots fine with the Vista HD attached, I unplug it, system won't boot. Same old "DISK BOOT FAILURE" right after BIOS..

Augh.

I had a similar problem. I had to do something with jumpers on the drives. I honestly think I just had to remove one of them. Worth a try

Try fixmbr from the recovery console


http://pcsupport.about.com/od/termsf/p/fixmbr.htm

The only drives in the system are SATA. No jumpers anywhere in sight. Doesn't matter if the PATA optical drive is plugged in or not either. Will try fixmbr now.

I made it so much worse. I removed the PATA drive, and tried to install Vista on a 500GB storage drive. I didn't know it would make the XP RAID volume unbootable. Now I can't get into XP at all. I can see all the files on the XP partition from Vista, though. This bites.

VistaBootPRO only shows 1 OS installed.

edit: oh yeah, it changed the drive letter of my RAID volume so even if I can get it booting, it is gonna be full of bad paths. Need to fix that too, but Disk Management won't let me change the driver letter, it says you can't change volumes that contain page files or system drives. Sigh.

can't you put in xp disk and have it repair? you can just yous vista, theres nothing wrong with vista.