Problem after installing Vista on 2nd drive

O

orson101

New Member
Evening people. I have a problem I have never run across before. Had a comp with XP. Decided to up to Vista. But Vista refused to install. Kept getting stop error. Tried it 3 times and gave up. So I had a second drive. BOTH are pata. So I did a clean install of vista on the second drive. Worked fine. THEN I tried to remove the original XP drive to just use the Vista drive. Oooops! NO boot. Reinstalled XP drive and it worked. But of course NOW I had built a dual boot system. NOT that I knew I even had, or wanted it. BUT now when I boot I have a choice between Vista and XP. Ok? Maybe I can live with that. BUT/ Vista used more space. So i decided to clone the Vista disk onto a larger Serial drive. So I cloned it using Seagate disc wizzard. Finished ok. So I removed the Vista pata drive. OH ******!
Ok. CRASH! When I went to boot? NTLDR missing error.
I started reading everything I could find online. Including here. THAT's HOW I found out about all the loaders being on ONE drive. NOT the Vista drives at all. ALL the system files are on the XP drive. So I can have BOTH pata drives installed AND the sata installed and windows runs fine. BOTH Xp and Vista will load and work fine. I can remove the sata drive. STILL ok. BUT? The instant I remove EITHER of the pata drives? BACK to NTLDR missing error.
THAT gets me HERE and NOW.
SO? My question is? NOW understanding that there is NO boot files on either the pata or the sata vista drive. I am mystified. The system will boot with both pata's. BUt? NOT with the XP pata and the Vista sata. So Obviously SOMETHING did not transfer correctly when Vista cloned from the pata to the sata. They were diFferent sizes. The pate was 100Gb and the sata was 200GB. ???? So IF I wanted to use JUST the serial(sata) Vista drive to boot, and ONE of the pata's for increased storage. WILL the utility HERE help me do it?
I have read of OTHER methods to recreate the boot files on the Vista sata drive, using a floppy or a thumb drive. BUT? BEFORE Im do ANYTHING I would like some opinions on this.
Thank you, Orson101.
 
When you installed Vista, it put its boot files on the "system" partition (XP) and automatically dual-booted. That's standard MS design for new OS following older OS.
When you cloned Vista to a new HDD, the UID in the BCD on the XP drive still points to the previous HDD (UID describes the physical disk ID and the start location of the partition).
Delete the Vista entry from the BCD and add a new one, pointing to the new Vista partition.
Use EasyBCD 2.0 "Backup/repair BCD" > "Change boot drive" and point it to your new HDD when it asks.
Change the BIOS to boot from the new HDD , then reboot into Vista
You should find that the new Vista is now "active" "system" "boot" in the Disk Management flags, and that you are now free to format and reuse for any purpose you wish, both the old partitions.
delete any redundant entries from the BCD and when you have only Vista left, you will no longer be presented with a boot menu.
 
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