Can't Recover Vista

[pkuchnicki]

I have a machine with twin hard drives. On the first drive I have a current
XP installation which I have used for years. On the second drive I have
installed Vista Enterprise edition. Everything was fine in Pleasantville.

I did not care for the dual boot choice forced on my by Vist on startup and
preferred my hard boot into the OS from a bios selection. So I wanted to get
rid of it.

I downloaded a copy of VistaBootPro which has a gui to simplify the
management of it. So I removed both boot options (and the only choices)
thinking it would remove the equivalent of the XP boot.ini file. Dorthy is
no longer in Kansas and she's certainly not happy.

It wouldn't boot and said to insert the Vista installation dvd and do a
repair. I can do that, I can do that.

It does load files from the VISTA media but unfortunately Vista just hangs
there and does nothing. No matter which drive I select from the BIOS, it
just sits there with the Vista background and nothing displayed. This is
like, the Twilight Zone.

Here's what I figure I can try:
1) create a slipstreamed CD from my original XP OS and SP2 interleaved, boot
from it and try to get to the Recovery Console where I can execute the FIXMBR
and maybe the FIXBOOT commands.

2) Take out one of the hard drives and put them into another machine as a
slave where I can either do the Recovery Console dance again or use something
like Casper XP which has the ability to execute its own fix mbr and boot
commands.

Anyone think this will work or that there is a better way? Did I drink too
much cool-aid?

 

[andy]

I have a machine with twin hard drives. On the first drive I have a current
XP installation which I have used for years. On the second drive I have
installed Vista Enterprise edition. Everything was fine in Pleasantville.

I did not care for the dual boot choice forced on my by Vist on startup and
preferred my hard boot into the OS from a bios selection. So I wanted to get
rid of it.

I downloaded a copy of VistaBootPro which has a gui to simplify the
management of it. So I removed both boot options (and the only choices)
thinking it would remove the equivalent of the XP boot.ini file. Dorthy is
no longer in Kansas and she's certainly not happy.

It wouldn't boot and said to insert the Vista installation dvd and do a
repair. I can do that, I can do that.

It does load files from the VISTA media but unfortunately Vista just hangs
there and does nothing. No matter which drive I select from the BIOS, it
just sits there with the Vista background and nothing displayed. This is
like, the Twilight Zone.

Here's what I figure I can try:
1) create a slipstreamed CD from my original XP OS and SP2 interleaved, boot
from it and try to get to the Recovery Console where I can execute the FIXMBR
and maybe the FIXBOOT commands.

2) Take out one of the hard drives and put them into another machine as a
slave where I can either do the Recovery Console dance again or use something
like Casper XP which has the ability to execute its own fix mbr and boot
commands.

Anyone think this will work or that there is a better way? Did I drink too
much cool-aid?

To fix booting the Vista drive, use the bootrec command from the Vista
DVD <http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;927392>.
First, go into bios setup, and set the Vista disk drive as the drive
that the bios boots without any intervention by you. Then boot the
Vista DVD, select repair, and run command prompt. Execute bootrec
/rebuildbcd and bootrec /fixboot. The Vista disk drive should now be
bootable.

 

[pkuchnicki]

We have lift-off, Houston!

Where's the moon?

After that recovery screen came up without any selectable OS's, a message
says, "If you don't see your operating system listed, click 'Load Drivers' to
load drivers for your hard drive."

RC sees the partitions, drives and folders, but I'm could not find where the
drivers Vista is talking about reside. The certainly weren't created by me
in advance of building Vista.