WOW - failed to do anything correctly

B

btovrea00

Member
:frowning:After removing the entire Vista partition, tried Manage Bootloader > Uninstall the Vista Bootloaderd (use to restore XP). Of course, after doing this, my system would not longer boot, period. Had to Acronis to restore my boot drive.

Guess the art of integration testing has totally been lost.
 
The feature works; as many people who've used it successfully can testify (and several who used it accidentally with unintended consequences). It's quite simple, just doing to the boot what a fresh, or a repair install of XP would do - Putting back the XP version of the PBR and MBR.
Describe in a bit more detail what you did, and in what way the boot failed and we'll try to help you find what the problem was.
 
Cooler heads prevail...

Ok, here is the setup:

drive 0 (F:smile: This is the boot drive and contained Vista in partition 2 which I removed.
drive 1 (C:smile: This is the XP drive

1. After removing F: partition 2, I rebooted and selected the "previous windows version". This worked fine and I was in XP.

2. Ran EasyBCD and selected remove Vista boot manager. Rebooted and got "No operating system installed on this disk". Reboot, changed the boot order to start with drive 1. greeted with a blank screen that never went away.

3. Inserted Acronis recovery disk, restored the C: and F: partitions and was back to step 1.

4. Used EasyBCD to remove Vista from the OS list. Set the startup delay to 0. This jusry rig works OK but is not what I wanted.

So, I guess on thing did work. Sorry for the generalizaion.
 
Can you post a screenshot of your disk management, so we can see where the flags are. The fact that you deleted Vista successfully on disk 0 without losing the boot suggests that partition 1 on disk 0 should be "system" "active". What else is on there ?
How did you remove Vista ?
As I described before, that button in EasyBCD rewrites the MBR /PRB to the XP version. Booting XP is more complex than just that.
If when you deleted Vista you also deleted the XP boot files with Vista, then XP won't boot no matter what PBR is in place.
 
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Ok, ntldr is ovbiously still there if you're getting into XP. With the latest beta of EasyBCD you should be able to have it autoconfigure though so go ahead and re-add XP's entry. Than you can try uninstalling the Vista bootloader again to see if ntldr boots XP on its own. You sure you got a boot.ini file with ntldr and ntdetect on disk 0?
 
Can you clarify whether disk 0 is first in your BIOS boot sequence ?
You called it "the boot drive" but XP on drive 1 has the "system" flag, which means that's where all the Windows boot files are located.
Can you post screenshots of the partition root of each drive. (Make sure that folder options are set like this so we can see everything)
My suspicion is that you've been booting with a non-bootable drive first in the BIOS and the boot has had to go to the second HDD each time.
When you instructed EasyBCD to rewrite the MBR/PBR, it would have done what you asked it to do, to the 1st HDD in the BIOS, making it bootable but without an OS, hence the hang up. Because the first disk became bootable, it no longer had to skip to the second disk.
If I'm right, all you need to do is put the XP disk first in the BIOS, then do the uninstall Vista bootloader again. This time it will rewrite the MBR/PBR on the correct disk.
 
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Terry's got a point. I bet if you changed rdisk(1)... in boot.ini to rdisk(0)... and put your XP drive first in the boot sequence you could pass bootmgr completely.

Now if I may ask, since you've gotten rid of Vista why again are you trying to get rid of bootmgr when it just boots XP anyway? Is it displaying a bootmenu? You can disable that with:

bcdedit /set {9dea862c-5cdd-4e70-acc1-f32b344d4795} displaybootmenu no
 
Thanks for all the help. I had previous change to bios to use disk 1 as the first look drive whereas when Vista was installed, I was using disk 0 as the boot drive (where Vista was installed). Everything seems to be working fine now. Again, thanks for the help.
 
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