installing Vista RC1 and now can't boot

[Liam]

I've a PC that has the following drives:
ATA(hd0): Fat32 - Storage
SATA(sd0): NTFS - formerly WinXP Pro, now Vista RC1
SATA(sd1): ext3 - 3 Fedora Core 6 partitions
DVD:
CDR-W:

I had it so the GRUB loader would allow me to select between Win and
Linux.
Now after installing Vista over (formatted) WInXP, when the PC boots I
get:

Remove disks or other media.
Press any key to restart

Even though I put CDROM as my first boot device, and put Knoppix in!
Won't recognize the CD drives, or something, anymore to allow me to use
Knoppix to examine the drives.

Right now I really don't care about keeping GRUB. If there's a way to
restore it, great, but if the only option is to make the system boot to
Vista only, I'll live with that, too.

Any advice or suggestions?
Thanks!
Liam

 

[Liam]

OK, update.
I'm half an idiot. I thought I'd checked the floppy drive, but guess
not. I had my RAID drivers in there from when installing Vista.

BUT, now, GRUB comes up and when I select Windows menu option, I get:

BOOTMGR is missing
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.

So, now what? Ideas?
Thanks!
Liam

 

[Liam]

OK, update.
I'm half an idiot. I thought I'd checked the floppy drive, but guess
not. I had my RAID drivers in there from installing Vista.

BUT, now, GRUB comes up and when I select Windows menu option, I get:

BOOTMGR is missing
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.

So, now what? Ideas?
Thanks!
Liam

Some more info:
When I boot with the Vista DVD and enter the System Recovery section,
it can't find my Vista installation (which, duh!, is my problem.)
It sees the ATA drive and calls it C:.
Once I load my SATA drivers, then it assigns my 1st SATA partition,
which has my Vista install, as drive F:.

So, evidently from what I can tell, Vista, when it tries to boot,
simply can't see the SATA drives and thus the Vista OS.
So, how in the world do I get it to see my SATA drives when it boots?
Is there something I can do in the DVD's System Recovery section?

Thanks!
Liam

 

[wisccal]

Hi Liam,

The following article describes how you can restore your MBR:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919529

Hope that helps.

Regards,
Steve
www.swiss-ins.com

 

[Liam]

Thanks for the reply!
Unfortunately, despite all the "operation successful"s after each step,
same thing happens.
It's because the Vista drive just isn't getting seen.
So, I'm going see if I can remove the ATA drive and have only SATA
drives going and reinstall Vista. See if that somehow causes the
bootloader to go to the right place and install some ability for it to
see the SATA drives on boot up.
Thanks
Liam

 

[Rock]

I've a PC that has the following drives:
ATA(hd0): Fat32 - Storage
SATA(sd0): NTFS - formerly WinXP Pro, now Vista RC1
SATA(sd1): ext3 - 3 Fedora Core 6 partitions
DVD:
CDR-W:

I had it so the GRUB loader would allow me to select between Win and
Linux.
Now after installing Vista over (formatted) WInXP, when the PC boots I
get:

Remove disks or other media.
Press any key to restart

Even though I put CDROM as my first boot device, and put Knoppix in!
Won't recognize the CD drives, or something, anymore to allow me to use
Knoppix to examine the drives.

Right now I really don't care about keeping GRUB. If there's a way to
restore it, great, but if the only option is to make the system boot to
Vista only, I'll live with that, too.

Post Vista issues to a Vista newsgroup. Here is one.
news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.windows.vista.general