I've been happily using Vista for some time on an 80 GB IDE drive. Eventually, though, I began to run out of space, and decided to buy a 320 GB SATA drive instead. I had other uses for the 80GB IDE, and I wanted to do a clean install of Vista on the SATA drive. However, for convenience, I decided I'd just dual boot for a bit with Vista on both drives until I got the new install set up and my data transferred. Last weekend, that was done. And so I decided to free up the 80 GB drive for other uses. A mistake, as it turns out.
With my feeble knowledge of booting, I decided I'd just format the IDE drive. Everythign I needed was on the SATA already, so I popped in my Vista install CD, and formatted the drive in question. Which worked, so I cancelled the install, and rebooted. Except I could not boot into anything -- it gave the infamous missing system disk error. The install CD couldn't repair it, even when I used the "repairing your boot sector" walkthtough on this site. (By the way, at the end, it says to roll up your sleeves and prepare for some torturous command-lining, but then it stops! Is there no more?!?)
Anyway, to make a long story short, I eventually resorted to installing XP on my IDE drive so I could use EasyBCD to fix my other drive. (Weird fact: The XP install didn't work the first time, and there were four or five really colorful ASCII characters in POST, where the computer froze. I mean, it was testing a drive, and the "i" in drive was capitalized and red on a yellow background. There was a flashing, accented cyan "e" somewhere, and things like that. It all worked on a reinstall, but does anyone know what could possibly cause this?)
EasyBCD itself could not fix the problem, but did enough that the install CD could finally fix it. All worked once more, giving me a dual boot Vista/XP system. I'm pretty sure I told Easy BCD to boot from my SATA drive.
Under the assumption that the problem was (perhaps) caused by formatting with the install CD, thus messing up my MBR, I used gParted to format the IDE drive a second time. Same problem. So, after installing XP, messing with EasyBCD, and repairing with the Vista install CD, I got it back to the VIsta XP dual boot.
I still want to free up the IDE drive, and I assume that the reaon this doesn't work is that the bootsector for my PC is on my IDE drive, thus every time I format it, the boot does not work. (Does that sound right?) My question is, can I use EasyBCD to move the Bootsector to the SATA drive? How? (If that information is on the site somewhere already, I apologize; I couldn't find it.)
Thanks a lot!
With my feeble knowledge of booting, I decided I'd just format the IDE drive. Everythign I needed was on the SATA already, so I popped in my Vista install CD, and formatted the drive in question. Which worked, so I cancelled the install, and rebooted. Except I could not boot into anything -- it gave the infamous missing system disk error. The install CD couldn't repair it, even when I used the "repairing your boot sector" walkthtough on this site. (By the way, at the end, it says to roll up your sleeves and prepare for some torturous command-lining, but then it stops! Is there no more?!?)
Anyway, to make a long story short, I eventually resorted to installing XP on my IDE drive so I could use EasyBCD to fix my other drive. (Weird fact: The XP install didn't work the first time, and there were four or five really colorful ASCII characters in POST, where the computer froze. I mean, it was testing a drive, and the "i" in drive was capitalized and red on a yellow background. There was a flashing, accented cyan "e" somewhere, and things like that. It all worked on a reinstall, but does anyone know what could possibly cause this?)
EasyBCD itself could not fix the problem, but did enough that the install CD could finally fix it. All worked once more, giving me a dual boot Vista/XP system. I'm pretty sure I told Easy BCD to boot from my SATA drive.
Under the assumption that the problem was (perhaps) caused by formatting with the install CD, thus messing up my MBR, I used gParted to format the IDE drive a second time. Same problem. So, after installing XP, messing with EasyBCD, and repairing with the Vista install CD, I got it back to the VIsta XP dual boot.
I still want to free up the IDE drive, and I assume that the reaon this doesn't work is that the bootsector for my PC is on my IDE drive, thus every time I format it, the boot does not work. (Does that sound right?) My question is, can I use EasyBCD to move the Bootsector to the SATA drive? How? (If that information is on the site somewhere already, I apologize; I couldn't find it.)
Thanks a lot!
