Vista won't boot correctly

R

ruf1

Member
Originally I had a Dual Boot Vista Ultimate 64 bit and XP Home 32-bit with XP installed first. Everything worked fine. XP on 250 GB Sata drive 1 partition, Vista on 1 TB raid 10, 1 partition.

I had some hardware problems and lost my raid array on. I recreated it and put an image (True Image Ver 11) of Vista back on it. Booted into XP used Easy BCD 1.6 which was the version I'd installed when the partitions were created. Restored by BCD and everything looked fine.

Now when I boot into Vista it doesn't want to make the Vista Partition drive C. Is there any fix for this? I know its a Vista problem and Easy BCD worked fine. But I'm at my wits edge and ready to do a complete reinstall. I have all my data its just a pain
 
I don't understand the problem....
Can you be a bit more specific about just what isn't work ATM?

btw, welcome to NST :smile:
 
Vista partion used to be assigned the C: drive when you booted into Vista. Now The XP partition is the C and Vista the D so none of the programs work.

I'll see if I can get the debug info from Easy BCD posted in a minute. It boots into Vista but Vista is on the wrong partition in this case all the Vista program files are on the F: drive right now because I didn't disconnect the backup drive (ESATA) and it has assigned it E:

SO currently When I boot into Vista its C: XP drive, D: DVD-RW, E: BACKUP DRIVE F: Vista Drive Prior to the crash when I booted into Vista it was C: Vista partition D: DVD-RW E: Backup Drive F: XP Drive and when I booted into XP it was C: XP drive, D: DVD-RW, E: BACKUP DRIVE F: Vista Drive .

I apologize for my verboseness I just don't know the proper words to describe my problem. Glad to be here at this forum I have been reading it for months now, bout time I signed up :smile:

Code: 
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {9dea862c-5cdd-4e70-acc1-f32b344d4795}
device partition=C:
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {7ea2e1ac-2e61-4728-aaa3-896d9d0a9f0e}
default {4ae0a9a8-103f-11dc-9c48-edfca9550c9b}
resumeobject {30412270-105d-11dc-b1fb-8ae8cdc98d9b}
displayorder {466f5a88-0af2-4f76-9038-095b170dc21c}
{4ae0a9a8-103f-11dc-9c48-edfca9550c9b}
toolsdisplayorder {b2721d73-1db4-4c62-bf78-c548a880142d}
timeout 7
Windows Legacy OS Loader
------------------------
identifier {466f5a88-0af2-4f76-9038-095b170dc21c}
device partition=C:
path \ntldr
description Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition (32-bit)
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {4ae0a9a8-103f-11dc-9c48-edfca9550c9b}
device partition=F:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Windows Vista (TM) Ultimate (recovered) 
osdevice partition=F:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {9fbb5b93-8a83-11dc-89a8-806e6f6e6963}
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I know what my problem is but have no idea how to fix it.

From Microsoft Technet
Deploy Windows images to the same drive letter. If you use ImageX to apply a Windows image, the drive letter to which the Windows reference image is installed must exactly match the drive letter that is recognized by the deployed Windows image. For example, if you capture a custom Windows image on drive C, you must deploy that image onto the partition that Windows recognizes as drive C on the destination computer.
This limitation applies only to deployment with ImageX. If you run Setup and reinstall Windows, you can change the drive to which Windows is installed.
Click to expand...
I used Acronis True image to capture the image, but my problem is the same. When I go to deploy the image the computer sees the RAID array as drive D:.

Therefore when the BCD is configured it sees the boot drive as C: and the \Windows installation as D: , it boots since the Vista drive has been identified as d:\windows, but cannot find any of the installed files which are looking for the c:\program files folder and all of that information is located on the RAID array D:

In older Windows terms my RAID array is disk (1) , partition (1) and when I boot onto the windows DVD to repair my installation it is assigning the drive letter D: to the RAID array

So my question is how do I set the RAID drive to C: prior to copying my image onto it?

This is definately not a EasyBCD problem. EasyBCD is doing exactly what it is supposed to do and a damned fine job, I might add, one of the finest and most useful freeware utilities I have ever used. Great job Computer Guru and anyone else here that helped to code and test it!!!
 
Thanks ruf.

Have you tried running EasyBCD | Change Settings and setting the drive for Vista to "BOOT" instead of C:\?
 
I tried the Boot but to no avail, it points to the Boot drive and my Vista drive is not my Boot drive my XP drive is. I actually am dealing with more than one problem here. I have learned alot in the past few days and think I can avoid making the same mistakes again so its not really that big of an issue. I have an image of all my data, its just not restorable, back to a working boot.

That's the root problem, I created a bad image by not backing up my Vista drive and the boot drive together. I first did a Full back-up image of the Vista drive and not the Boot drive, realized my mistake but instead of creating a new Full Backup of both drives as a set. I just added the XP (Boot) drive to an incremental back-up, and in effect corrupted my MBR within the back-up. OOps.

When I first restore and look at the debug data from easy BCD most of the fields for the Vista entry say deleted partition. So when I fix it using EasyBCD it fills in all the proper drive information. But the OS itself has lost its bearings, When I boot it loads Vista as the D: drive and then proceeds to inform me that, my user profile is corrupt, points to C:\users. Same with anything else that's not loaded from the Windows directory itself. So its pretty much a useless mess. Internet is unavailable, IE is looking for data from my user profile, and gives an error message to the effect that per user instantancing is unavailable and shuts down. Can't run anything that keeps its data in Program Files, so if I try and start EasyBCD it will load and then fault due to .net not being loaded... I could go on but I think I have painted the ugly picture pretty well.

It's not a big deal though its as simple as a clean install of Vista and putting my data back in then reinstalling my core programs. I appreciate your quick responce and the level of detail here at the forum and on your Wiki. Between here and Microsoft TechNet I have been able to teach myself to a basic understanding of the debug info, as well as becoming familiar with Vista's RE and image based installation. I have also learned to use a number of useful tools bootrec.exe, bootsect.exe, Diskpart, I have tried at least 15-20 different angles to try and get up and running. I have also developed an intrest in Ubuntu which I didn't know anything about when I started this adventure.

As a learning experience its been a fun ride, so in the end I'm not even sorry it happened. Thanks for being here CG. :smile:
 
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