Deleted XP, now Vista will only boot if all other drives are disconnected

S

seanys

Member
I (foolishly it seems) deleted XP, from the master PATA drive, and now Vista, on the first SATA drive, won't boot with any of the other drives plugged in.

It boots fine if I disconnect the other drives.

With the PATA drives connected Vista appears on 'E' but with the PATA drives disconnected it appears on 'C', when booted with the Vista Install CD.

I tried the 'Nuclear Holocaust' Vista boot loader recovery but it fails every time at "bcdedit.exe /import c:\boot\bcd.temp" with "store import failed" or similar. I get the same regardless of whether Vista is on 'C' or 'E'.

I can't disable drives from being 'Active' because I can't get Vista to boot to see which ones are 'Active'.

How can I repair the boot? What else can I check?
 
Last edited:
Hello sean, welcome to NST.
Reboot, and when you get to the first splash screen at startup, you should see what key you need to press to enter the BIOS, if only for a moment. So press that key, and then navigate to the section called "boot sequence", "boot order", or something similar. And then put your Vista SATA drive first in the boot sequence in the BIOS, and you will be able to leave the other drives connected, and still boot into Vista.

Cheers.

Jake
 
Thanks for the reply Jake.

I tried changing the order of the drives in the BIOS without success. I've removed the PATA drives and put the Vista drive as the 1st SATA drive and this has solved the problem.
 
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