Vista can't boot without DVD

[Boris Buchanan]

Just installed Vista on the second of two SATA RAID arrays on a new PC with
the nVidia nForce4 for AMD chipset. The first array had XP SP2 (an old IDE
drive with another XP installation was also present). The install process
finished without problem, but after installation, the system only boots with
the Vista distribution DVD in the drive. The system is not booting from the
DVD. It is booting from the array, but appears to require information on
the DVD to succeed. When the DVD is not present, booting halts with the
message: "BOOTMGR is missing. Press CTL+ALT+DEL."

I tried using bootsect to reinstall the bootloader, but this helped none. I
also tried booting from the distribution DVD and running the repair
installation tool, but the tool found no problems with the installation.

I also observed the installation has no \boot directory. I believe I have
read that Vista installations always have \boot directories.

How can I repair my installation so that it boots without the DVD present?

Boris

 

[John Barnes]

Check to make sure that the Vista boot file is on the system drive (check in
disk management).

 

[nicholas hall]

Do you have multiple hard drives?

I had a problem similar to you before and I found that when I changed the
boot order in the BIOS the problem went away.
The problem happened because when I installed Vista I had set my computer to
boot first of my DVD drive and the next choice was my second hard drive.
Once I had installed Vista I changed the boot order to my main hard drive
thus meaning when vista started up the bootloader was looking for the boot
manager in a place it did not exist.

NIK

 

[andy]

Run the Disk Management snap-in in Vista to identify the hard drive
that contains the System partition. The BIOS has to be set to boot
that hard drive. For Phoenix/Award BIOS, move that drive to the top of
the drive list in the Hard Disk Boot Priority setting. For AMI BIOS,
the setting is Hard Disk Drives.

 

[John Barnes]

And the partition with the boot manager has to be the active partition.

 

[srodgers]

I had the exact type of problem with Vista not booting from a SATA HD.
Finally cured it with a BIOS update from Gigabyte for the MB. This has
been the only problem I have had with 3 different installs.

 

[djphatic]

I am having the same problem

I recently installed vista ultimate x64 by booting from the disc using the f11 boot menu and formatting my hard-drive with winxp installation to have a clean vista install. After installation, i have a problem where vista will not boot unless the bios is set to boot from cd/dvd drive and the disc must be in the drive; otherwise i get the message "disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter". If I then put the disc in and press enter, it still will not boot; so the disc must be in the drive when the PC starts/restarts and the bios set to boot from cd/dvd drive.
The drive I have installed vista onto is a 80gb SATA; I tried booting into vista with all other devices disconnected so only the hard-drive was connected on its own, but this still didnt work.

Having a look around I havent found a solution yet but someone managed to fix there problem (was a different mobo tho) by flashing their bios to the latest version. I was running version 1.9 and updated to 1.D; though this hasnt fixed the problem and instead the booting up of the PC seems to be slower as it takes longer for IDE detection to come up. I flashed the bios down a step to 1.C to see if this speeded things back up but it still has a slower boot and the IDE detection doesnt come up as quick as on 1.9. Is this common?

I can live with the slower IDE detection but I would like to fix the problem with booting vista via the dvd; anyone have any suggestions?
Also I have noticed that the SATA drives are displayed under Device Manager as ATA devices within Vista; I havent been able to install any nforce4 drivers which comply with vista x64 so the drivers installed are from vista installation.

Any help is much appreciated.

Mark


PC Spec:

- MSI K8N Neo4 (PCB1.0 MS-7125, Bios 1.C)
- AMD64 3200+ (Skt939)
- Coolermaster Hyper48
- 2x 512Mb Mushkin PC3200 Dual Channel Level 1 CL2, 2-3-2
- 1x PIONEER DVR-111L DVD, 1x BENQ DW1620 DVD
- Sapphire Radeon 256MB x800 xt
- Auzentech X-Mystique 7.1 HDA Sound Card
- Tagan 420W PSU
- Hard Drives: 1x 80GB SATA Seagate ST380817AS (OS), 1x 320GB SATA-2 Western Digital WD3200YS, 1x 500GB SATA-2 Samsung HD501LJ, 1x 160GB ATA Hitachi 7K250, 1x 160GB ATA Samsung SP1604N

EggHeadCafe.com - .NET Developer Portal of Choice
http://www.eggheadcafe.com

 

[djphatic]

turns out that if youve got PATA (IDE) drives connected vista will install the Master Boot Record (MBR) onto Device 0; this being your primary IDE hard drive. Ive managed to fix it by disconnecting all hard-drives other than the one im installing to before installing vista.
I imagine you can just disconnect the PATA drives rather than all drives.

Hope this helps.

EggHeadCafe.com - .NET Developer Portal of Choice
http://www.eggheadcafe.com

 

[Hugh Wyn Griffith]

I had this problem back with W2K when I had one EIDE drive and several
scsi drives and wanted the OS on the faster safer scsi ......

 

[Guest]

this is the answer, I had this issue, the SATA drive that used to have XP on
it was listed before the drive that has vista on it (in boot order). since I
had formatted the old XP drive, there was no bootmgr on it. once I switched
the order to put the vista drive first in priority and the blank drive
second, it booted fine without the vista disk.

thanks!