No end of trouble...

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
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G

Guest

No matter what drive you install Vista on, I believe it overwrites the boot
file on "C:" If you installed an independant boot manager, such as Norton's
BootMagic, or several of the freeware options, this may help with your issue.
 
I know it's my own fault - I should have backed up, BUT...

I attempted to install Vista on a spare PATA drive in my PC, and it seemed
at first to have worked out ok - it booted successfully into the original
Windows XP afterwards. However, booting into Vista caused a "missing
WINLOAD.EXE" message. I took the Vista drive out of the PC, and the original
XP wouldn't boot. Tried to resurrect it with FIXBOOT and FIXMBR from the XP
CD - but I ended up with a corrupted partition.

I've been running recovery software on this drive for the past 20 hours, and
it looks like it should recover everything. I guess the moral of this story
is to backup everything before you even put the Vista DVD in the drive. - or
better yet, don't waste your time trying to set-up dual boot.

Fran
Click to expand...

Next time you try it unplug all the cables from your XP HDD and just
leave the spare drive on set to Master. When it all goes wrong your XP
HDD is untouched, just plug it back in. Its a pain but the safest way
to test BETA short of a dedicated test PC.

Jonah
 
don't waste your time trying to set-up dual boot.

Bingo. Otherwise you have a beta OS managing your hardware/partitions/data
files. And that's not a good idea. Having your (only) backups on those is
just as good as having no backup at all.
 
I actually move mine to the neighbour's house, just in case...
Click to expand...
Thats not entirely silly, I have in the past gotten confused with
which drive is which and re-formatted the wrong bloody drive.

"Oh dearie me" I said, several times.

Jonah
 
This problem had been bugging me for a while. My HD setup is:
C: IDE (XP installation)
D: SATA (Vista installation)
E: SATA
The only thing I could think of was that my disk configuration was causing
Vista problems. I decided to take a look at the drive BIOS settings and I
noticed that the IDE/SATA Raid function was enabled. Since my drives are not
set up in a Raid array, I disabled this and rebooted and....hey presto!....I
now reach the boot select screen with no problems and Vista loads OK.

Now if only I can get the drivers for my Creative X-Fi to work.....
 
I know it's my own fault - I should have backed up, BUT...

I attempted to install Vista on a spare PATA drive in my PC, and it seemed
at first to have worked out ok - it booted successfully into the original
Windows XP afterwards. However, booting into Vista caused a "missing
WINLOAD.EXE" message. I took the Vista drive out of the PC, and the original
XP wouldn't boot. Tried to resurrect it with FIXBOOT and FIXMBR from the XP
CD - but I ended up with a corrupted partition.

I've been running recovery software on this drive for the past 20 hours, and
it looks like it should recover everything. I guess the moral of this story
is to backup everything before you even put the Vista DVD in the drive. - or
better yet, don't waste your time trying to set-up dual boot.

Fran
 
i've started the installation of vista from the windows desktop and then got
a dual boot without problems
 
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