Red Green said:
Well, i figured out part of the problem. [snip]
Its looking on D:, my other hard drive for the bootmgr. I cant figure out
how to change this though, any ideas?
I had a similar problem which I was able to solve, so maybe this will help:
I have a slow 30GB PATA drive and a fast 300GB SATA drive, both of which I
wiped prior to installing Vista. I forgot that in my BIOS, I had the PATA
rather than the SATA drive set as bootable (though I don't know whether this
caused or even influenced my problem). I installed Vista RC1 from scratch,
specifying the 300GB drive. After installing Vista with no problems, I
discovered that when I set my BIOS to boot from the 300GB drive (where Vista
was installed) rather than the 30GB drive, the BIOS would fail to load
Vista, giving a "non system disk or disk error" message.
Setting the boot drive back to the 30GB drive so that Vista would boot, I
checked Control Panel/Admin Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management and
discovered that my 30GB drive was set as Active and Boot, and the 300GB
drive wasn't. I then noticed that the 30GB drive had data on it, even though
I'd not put anything there. It had bootmgr and the boot directory, neither
of which the 300GB drive had (though the latter had the entire Vista
installation).
To fix the problem, I moved bootmgr and the boot directory to the 300GB
drive, marked the latter as active using Disk Management, shut down the
system, set the 300GB drive as the boot drive in the BIOS again, booted off
the Vista RC1 DVD and ran the startup repairer, and then rebooted... and
this time, Vista booted successfully directly off the 300GB drive.