Knocked Drive Loose - Caused Boot Problems

Jplaskett

New Member
Hello,

I am a new user and I am hoping this forum will help. Here's my issue:

I already had XP installed on my system on my original 250gig SATA hard drive. I decided I wanted Vista and installed a second 80gig SATA drive into my system and installed Vista onto that hard drive. After re-booting, I had my dual boot screen ask me which OS I wanted. It worked perfectly. Then...I decided to add some more RAM to my system, and in-advertantly, while in the case, I accidentaly knocked a cable loose to the 250gig hard drive. It was not getting power when I booted it and when I booted I get a message says OS not found. I panic, not realizing I knocked the power loose and I run the Vista repair thingy on the install disk and then I boot to Vista. It was when I got into the OS that I realized that I could not see the 250 gig HD at all. I power down, open up and realize I had knocked the power loose and replace it. Only now problem is that after I reboot the second time I have no dual boot option anymore. I can still see all of my XP files and directories in my Vista Explorer, but I can't boot to XP. I thought about shutting down and trying to boot to the orginal XP HD only, but I wonder if there is an easier way?

Thanks in advance for help! JP :huh:
 
Boot Order

I suspect you are still booting from the 80GB drive and its installation of Vista. Go into the bios and make sure your 250GB drive is the first hard drive in the hard drive boot priority list.

You should then have the 250Gb drive booting. Both XP and Vista should still boot. The Vista boot manager should still be pointing to the winload.exe located on your second drive. Give it a go, it'll only take seconds to see if I'm correct.

Regards
 
I don't know how much this helps, but anyways:

Get EasyBCD, install it on Vista and add XP entry. Sorry if I'm talking rubbish, but that's how it should go if you have Vista boot working.
 
Jason's advice is pretty sound - it seems to be the most likely answer under the circumstances.

(topic renamed)
 
lol, no, you're suggestion wasn't wrong: just most likely not enough to make it work. It would work under normal circumstances, but he has a couple of things to do first :smile:
 
Back
Top