Failure to boot from hard drive

J

jason_in98

New Member
I'll try to summarize the events leading up to my problem as best I can.

I have two hard drives. I tried installing Windows Vista Business on the first one to use in a dual-boot configuration with Windows XP which was on the second hard drive. Well, the Vista installation worked fine, but when I went to boot into XP, I found Vista's boot loader hadn't recognized Windows XP. Clearly frustrated, I tried several different things until I finally decided to format the first hard drive. It was horrible I lost my entire data from the Hard drive. Vista made my data vanish. I hate it. I tried using repair tool and many recovery software, but it did not work. Please help me out.
 
Your mistake was not backing things up to the second drive before reformatting the first. being that Vista is a newer version of Windows you have to treat as a second not first OS when going to multiboot it. When installing XP on a system with 98 98 would have to be on the first partition or drive in order to see the newer OS go on last. Likewise Vista went onto the second ide drive here with XP Home on the first. Vista and XP are both running. The option to load XP appeared initially when Vista copied files and created folders on the XP primary with it's new boot manager.
 
Well, I don't know about you, but I bypass the boot menu ALL together. My motherboard can select which individual hard drive to boot from, so I just install XP and vista in two physical drives individually and set which one to use in the BIOs. Nice and easy.
 
You still have to install the newer version following the older since that is intended to upgrade the older. You can XP on any drive and the Vista installer will add that into it's own boot manager. The newer version will automatically assign itself as the default OS until you edit the boot loader itself to make any changes there.

The F8 on some boards brings up a boot menu right when the post test finished listing the drives installed onto the system. That only allows you to select the drive you want to boot for that session alone. Once you restart the system the bios boot order setting will then go the first in line except when the boot loader has been altered by the installer for a second OS that is. When Vista followed XP Pro on the second drive here the system no longer booted the XP Home primary even though it was the first in the boot order seen in the bios.
 
I know Vista doesn’t install itself easily. Something must have happened, that’s for sure. What software you have used to recover your data? One of the data recovery software I know is Salvage Data recovery Software for windows. My friend used the software and got his data back. Few days back I tried to recover the data of my office system, which I lost accidentally while formatting and it worked well. Try with their software. I think their site name is salvage data.
All the best.
 
With all of the software here tied up in XP it made sense to simply install the first release on a second drive and had hoped second partition there as well. Things didn't go that way. Vista refused! XP Pro was later installed onto a third drive just added for storage when that happened. So now I have Windows in the middle of the storage and backup drive.

Frequent backups are the real key to prevent data loss. The second partition there was originally for storage until that had to wiped to see a single primary for Vista. The problems seen when installing the new version were mainly from being not quite familiar with how it was going to go. The user account control feature is your worst there. It's far more thorough then the Windows firewall ever could think of being until disabled that is.
 
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