Hi There
I will give a stmt of my problem and then the background of how i got here.
At this point i hope someone can help as i am desparate and starting to think i will have to reinstall the OS which is a nightmare of work given how much stuff is on my PC.
The problem now is that i have the original drive C: that has vista installed by HP from factory and a second physical drive M where vista has marked as having the boot info. I can tell this from the windows symbol on the drive in windows explorer and in disk mgmt by seeing M marked as system, boot etc... In disk mgmt both c and m are marked as active so that is not an issue.
I have downloaded EasyBCD and followed the instructions to "reset bcd storage" and also separately to "recreate missing/deleted boot files". When i do either of these afterwards i see that in view settings The boot drive has switched back from M to C drive. However, when i boot up it goes back to booting from M and once in easy BCD, the settings is back to boot from M.
Also, i have of course worked the BIOS to ensure the bios is set to boot from my C drive but the system appears to ignore this and boot from M.
Background
I am running a 6 month old HP AMD quad core desktop with Vista Home Premium 64 bit.
I had a hard drive failure 3 months in and based on that i wanted a solution to backup the main OS drive. My data is on a separate raid HP media Server.
Thus recently i got another drive and Norton Ghost.
I added the new drive and installed ghost.
I did a one time copy of the C drive and its D recovery partition to the new drive M and its O partition for recovery data as well.
This seemed fine.
I then wanted to test the ability to use this "backup" if my main drive ever died.
Thus i changed the BIOS to boot off the OS copy on drive M and rebooted.
All seemed fine and the OS worked.
I shut down and changed the BIOS back to boot from the old C drive.
I booted up and it seemed ok.
Then next morning my HP Home Sever Connector software told me an update was available and i told it to update itself, the update failed.
After some investigation and trial reinstalls manually i got the message that the windows installer service was not working.
After A LOT of googling and some attempts to fix it that didn't fully work i realised that unlike xp vista can not reinstall the installer separately, and i would need to reinstall the OS.
I happen to have already installed a bought copy of Windows 7 on my laptop downstairs so figured the best of a bad situation would be to upgrade this machine to windows 7 and that would get a new OS and the installer issues would be resolved. I had planned to upgrade this machine at some point anyways.
When i tried to upgrade the OS it informed me that due to my OS being spread across 2 drives it could not do an upgrade and i would need to do a clean install.
I called MS support and they really could not help.
At this point i started to realise what had happenned and that my OS was now on 1 disk with the boot on the new copy M disk.
Im at my wits end with this and have read as much as i can find but am unsure how to fix this.
Please HELP ME as im getting desparate.
I could do a HP recovery which would wipe the computer and start again but am trying to avoid due to the massive amount of work involved.
Thanks
Daniel Raithby
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Addendum:
i assume that system restore will not correct a problem that is so low level like this?
I will give a stmt of my problem and then the background of how i got here.
At this point i hope someone can help as i am desparate and starting to think i will have to reinstall the OS which is a nightmare of work given how much stuff is on my PC.
The problem now is that i have the original drive C: that has vista installed by HP from factory and a second physical drive M where vista has marked as having the boot info. I can tell this from the windows symbol on the drive in windows explorer and in disk mgmt by seeing M marked as system, boot etc... In disk mgmt both c and m are marked as active so that is not an issue.
I have downloaded EasyBCD and followed the instructions to "reset bcd storage" and also separately to "recreate missing/deleted boot files". When i do either of these afterwards i see that in view settings The boot drive has switched back from M to C drive. However, when i boot up it goes back to booting from M and once in easy BCD, the settings is back to boot from M.
Also, i have of course worked the BIOS to ensure the bios is set to boot from my C drive but the system appears to ignore this and boot from M.
Background
I am running a 6 month old HP AMD quad core desktop with Vista Home Premium 64 bit.
I had a hard drive failure 3 months in and based on that i wanted a solution to backup the main OS drive. My data is on a separate raid HP media Server.
Thus recently i got another drive and Norton Ghost.
I added the new drive and installed ghost.
I did a one time copy of the C drive and its D recovery partition to the new drive M and its O partition for recovery data as well.
This seemed fine.
I then wanted to test the ability to use this "backup" if my main drive ever died.
Thus i changed the BIOS to boot off the OS copy on drive M and rebooted.
All seemed fine and the OS worked.
I shut down and changed the BIOS back to boot from the old C drive.
I booted up and it seemed ok.
Then next morning my HP Home Sever Connector software told me an update was available and i told it to update itself, the update failed.
After some investigation and trial reinstalls manually i got the message that the windows installer service was not working.
After A LOT of googling and some attempts to fix it that didn't fully work i realised that unlike xp vista can not reinstall the installer separately, and i would need to reinstall the OS.
I happen to have already installed a bought copy of Windows 7 on my laptop downstairs so figured the best of a bad situation would be to upgrade this machine to windows 7 and that would get a new OS and the installer issues would be resolved. I had planned to upgrade this machine at some point anyways.
When i tried to upgrade the OS it informed me that due to my OS being spread across 2 drives it could not do an upgrade and i would need to do a clean install.
I called MS support and they really could not help.
At this point i started to realise what had happenned and that my OS was now on 1 disk with the boot on the new copy M disk.
Im at my wits end with this and have read as much as i can find but am unsure how to fix this.
Please HELP ME as im getting desparate.
I could do a HP recovery which would wipe the computer and start again but am trying to avoid due to the massive amount of work involved.
Thanks
Daniel Raithby
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Addendum:
i assume that system restore will not correct a problem that is so low level like this?
Last edited: