Help! Vista no longer available to boot up!

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dark_threat

New Member
I had XP pro installed on my computer, and then I got vista but didn't want to wipe xp just yet in case i didn't like vista. So i installed vista on my second hard drive (i have two). Then I needed some more room and decided I was going to take windows out, but since it wasn't upgraded, there was no clear way to uninstall xp, so i booted vista in safe mode and told it to format C: with automatic options (which is the hard drive with XP on it), but it said that it was not allowed to wipe a system partition (for XP), so then i just typed format C: with no options and it said that the drive was in use, but I could dismiss it and all opened handles would become invalid. So i said yes, and it formatted it.

Beforehand, when I started my computer, it allowed me to choose to open vista or XP, but after the format it said that no operating system was found. So i had to reinstall windows on the formatted harddrive and I can access the second drive, and everything is there, however I cannot boot vista.

Is there something I can do to be able to boot vista?

I tried setting the boot options to the 1st hard drive and then the second, but vista still wont boot.

I appreciate any help
 
if you're talking about something phsiycally about the hard drive, then nothing was changed from when it worked to now. Its's been exactly the same for half a year
 
i did, i have the options for xp and vista now, but the problem is that vista doesn't use boot.ini to boot anymore, it uses a new bcd store which i don't know how to use or change within xp
 
Wiped the main drive? Sounds like the MBR, or Master Boot Record, has been damaged...

I am not sure if the XP CD will let you run Repair commands or not without having XP installed, but if so, you could try to boot the CD and run "fixmbr".
 
thanks for the help, I tried the fixmbr, and atleast i could log onto the vista windows in that, but once i fixed the mbr/wrote a new one, i could not login to the vista anymopre, but nothing else stopped working, so i think i'll just reinstall vista, thx for the help
 
actually, nevermind, the fixed boot record did screw me up, now i can't access that hard drive, it says it needs to be formatted; what a fickle world. oh well, i was going to format everything all over again and start fresh anyway, so here we go.
 
Hm...
Anyway, it seems to me that you wiped Vista and not XP.
To any Windows OS, the drive it is installed on is set to C:\
So, for Vista, the drive it is installed on is C:\ and XP is probably D:\
And for XP, the XP install is C:\ and Vista is D:\

This is my setup at least. The drive letter is really just OS specific. It's not actually part of te hard drive (the drive letter).
Most operating systems (such as Linux or Mac) don't even use drive letters but mount the drive accrding to it's label.
 
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