Cant find Hard drive

J

JRockZ

Member
Ok yesterday i was tweaking some settings in my bios, i found out the memory i have willl run at 2.1V and when i checked it in my bios it was at 1.9 so i bumped it up, then when i restarted the pc it gave the BCD error saying the boot file was lost or corupted and hardware has changed etc.... No i didnt already have EasyBCD already installed or backed up but i can assure you i will after all this!!.
So ok heres the deal now, when i try the vista recovery tools the drive doesnt even show up, i know the problem is NOT the hard drive, if i set up vista to completly reinstall it clearly shows that my partitions are still there, Ive read a few of the tutorials i found on the web and tried what i could that applied but nothings worked out.
So now my question is if i move my hard drive to a working (xp) computer as a slave drive can i install Easy BCD and see if or try to have it recover the MBR and then pull the hard drive back out and reinstall it in the correct computer?? at this point i cant seem to think of anything else that might work. I dont understand why Vista recovery wont see my install but apparently something got really messed up.
Any info would be much appreciated.
Thanks
JRockZ
Oh and this is a single boot system single hard drive and single partition on an almost new western digital 160gb drive. will post other specs if needed just let me know.
 
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Hi JRockZ, welcome to NST.
When you say "the Vista Recovery tools" are you refering to an OEM recovery partition or to a Vista DVD ?
If you boot from a Vista DVD and select "repair my computer" / "repair startup", you should see a Vista partitition to repair, but I have seen people on here who, finding none, hit "next" (or whatever the button's labeled) and found that the repair went ahead sucessfully anyway.
You generally need to repeat the repair once or twice till it's fixed everything.
Are you sure you didn't change something in the BIOS relating to the HDD or the boot sequence and accidentally save it alongside your RAM voltage tweak ?
The answer to your question about EasyBCD and XP is that you can install and run it on XP, as long as you have previously ensured that Net 2.0 framework is installed. (custom options in Windows Update)
 
Installing your Vista drive into the XP computer well make it so you can boot Vista from that computer, but moving it back well not help.

You need to revert the setting changes you made first before anything else. Seeing as how your installation didn't show up as you were trying to repair, I would assume your BIOS gives you the choice of operating in different hard drive modes (ex. SATA/AHCI,RAID). If you modified this setting revert back to the default and try to boot Vista again. If that doesn't work, you should now at least be able to see your installation in the list of OSes to repair.
 
Yes i am using the vista dvd and ive tried everything , read through many posts and many seem to have the same issue. I did set my bios back to how it was and even clear my cmos and reset my boot order leaving everyting at default still no matter what i do nothing works. I went ahead and ran the repair start up tool anyhow (many times) if i read the log afterwords it shows that under every test the system folder is corupt or severly damaged. The files i have on it are not all that important i guess, I can always just reinstall, i needed to upgrade to 64 bit version anyhow and i have a new motherboard that will be here this week sometimes (was for another computer) it will handle more memory so i may just swap out the board while im at it, i would just like to be able to get the new install done now before the new mobo shows up but im afraid if i do that then there will be driver errors or hardware changes that will just cause me to have to reinstall vista again. Since the mobo's are from the same manufactuerer i figure maybe i wont have that problem but i dont care to waste all that time just to have to do it again. Thanks for your help guys i give up now dont have the time to mess with it i will just reinstall everything when my parts arrive. EZBCD will be one of my first addone apps though thats for sure!!
Thanks

Addendum:

I thought i would try one more time now the drive still is not found however it does come up in dos when i run DIR i can see the files names etc... I tried the holocoust tut but when i run
C:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt60 all /force it says that C:\boot\bootsect.exe is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file, I was trying as a last ditch effort seeing as it snow able to see the drive in dos ( it didnt before).
Thanks
JRockZ
 
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Now i get this error after i run the startup repair tool, See photos
 

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O-boy nevermid ithink it was actually finding my usb thumb drive LOL now i keep getting the system volume on disk is corupt error again . Guess i give up will wait and see what everyone has to say but will just plan on doing a complete reinstall :cry: :cry:
JRockZ
 
Boot the computer with your USB stick pluggied in but make sure your cd-rom has priority if you are going to use it to get your files.
 
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