vista boot problem

[Guest]

Hello everyone.
I have a big problem and I don't have any idea on how to solve it.
I had Vista installed on the single hard drive on my computer. Recently I've
bought a new hard drive exactly like the one I had (SATA2 Seagate 320Gb) and
tried to install it on my system. So I shutdown the computer, plugged in the
new HDD and booted into Vista. Everything ok for now. I went to Disk
Management to format and partition the new HDD. But, for every partition I
made Vista would ask to install the drivers (New device found .. etc), only
it didn't find any drivers. Also when it was supposed to finish making and
format a volume (partition) there was this error : "The operation failed to
complete because the Disk Management console view is not up-to-date. Refresh
the view by using the refresh task. If the problem persists close the Disk
Management console, then restart Disk Management or restart the computer". I
tried closing and opening again the Disk Management window but the partitions
looked the same (no letter named for the drives nor any "healthy" beside). So
I restarted the computer, as said in that error message.
And here is the BIG problem: it didn't boot up anymore. It says something
about
"error 7 (I hope I remember correctly) chainloader /boot .. press any
keys..."; after pressing a key it goes to a box with a highlighted Vista text
from where I can open a command line, edit the grub etc. It's just that I
don't know what to do from there.
Of course I tried repairing Vista but to no joy. It doesn't find any
problems at startup. What should I do to get back my booting Vista ?
Also I installed a clean copy of Vista on the new HDD separately (with the
old HDD removed) and when I plugged-in the old HDD it booted ok at first but
after one restart I got the same error with chainloader /boot. It seems that
Vista doesn't like 2 hard drives... what could be the cause of that ?
Thanks in advance for your time and answers.

 

[peter]

seems like you dont know what you actually have...........maybe this will
help
http://f3wm.free.fr/linux/grub.html

peter

 

[Guest]

seems like you dont know what you actually have...........maybe this will
help
http://f3wm.free.fr/linux/grub.html

peter

no. I haven't installed any linux or grub on my machine. I just thought the
Vista had an buit-in grub because that's what it said. If I bust my actual
copy of Vista again and reach that boot error again I'll try to be more
specific on what the error reports.
Meanwhile I'm trying to figure out why didn't Vista install the new hard
drive.
And why after I installed Vista on the new HDD and booted with both hard
drives plugged it went perfectly ok at first and I could see and access the
old HDD from win explorer and after one restart I get the same boot error and
this Vista becomes unusable too (remember this is the new OS separate from
the one I want to recover - that reported the boot error).
I don't know if I'm making myself understood very well.

 

[John]

Go to device Manager and get the details on your SATA controller chip. Now
see if you see any folder related to the manufacturer of that chip.
Somewhere in your system are the drivers or your system is not using SATA
but compatability mode. You might also let indows search the Win\inf folder
for a suitable driver.

 

[Guest]

Go to device Manager and get the details on your SATA controller chip. Now
see if you see any folder related to the manufacturer of that chip.
Somewhere in your system are the drivers or your system is not using SATA
but compatability mode. You might also let indows search the Win\inf folder
for a suitable driver.

Yes John, I thought about the inf folder too .. but after the damage had
been done. And now in order to try again to install the new hard drive I have
to boot up from the old HDD -> the old Vista that lost its boot files.
One other thing. Looking on the internet for a solution, I remebered that I
right clicked one of the new partitions created in DiskMngmt and then
activated it. And I read now somewhere that when you choose one particularly
active partition Vista takes all the boot files (no matter the OS) and puts
them on that volume. Is that right ? I'm thinking .. if I locate the boot
files of that copy of Vista that I want to revive (bootmgr, bcd .. what else
... ) I could then move them to another partition and make Vista boot from
there.. This is my logical thinking after a few hours of researching on the
net .. but don't really know how to do this step by step. Does this make any
sense ?

 

[John Barnes]

What type of Vista DVD do you have, upgrade or full? If full, why don't you
just hook up your new drive, install Vista, partitioning and formatting
(advanced) when you get to the section where you select where to install
Vista? You probably won't like the results of installing from within Vista
since the new installation will receive a different drive letter than C when
you are done.

 

[Guest]

ok. I booted again from my old HDD (only!) and have some screens that I put
here for better understanding:

this is the boot error :
<a href="http://img352.imageshack.us/my.php?image=01booterrordu9.jpg"
target="_blank"><img
src="http://img352.imageshack.us/img352/7909/01booterrordu9.th.jpg"
border="0" alt="Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us" /></a>

this is after pressing any key:
<a href="http://img399.imageshack.us/my.php?image=02afteranykeygg2.jpg"
target="_blank"><img
src="http://img399.imageshack.us/img399/7702/02afteranykeygg2.th.jpg"
border="0" alt="Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us" /></a>

this is after pressing e:
<a href="http://img466.imageshack.us/my.php?image=03afterpressingera1.jpg"
target="_blank"><img
src="http://img466.imageshack.us/img466/8831/03afterpressingera1.th.jpg"
border="0" alt="Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us" /></a>

this is after pressing e again:
<a href="http://img181.imageshack.us/my.php?image=04afterpressingerj9.jpg"
target="_blank"><img
src="http://img181.imageshack.us/img181/5817/04afterpressingerj9.th.jpg"
border="0" alt="Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us" /></a>

so what do you think ?

 

[John Barnes]

uninstall the Linux bootloader and install Vista.

 

[Guest]

uninstall the Linux bootloader and install Vista.

What do you mean ? I have never installed any linux bootloader nor any ver.
of Linux on this computer EVER !
And my main goal here is to revive my old Vista from my old hard drive and
having at the same time my new HDD plugged in.

 

[Rick Rogers]

The images very clearly show the bootloader as being grub4dos, which is a
Linux extension. Did you use something to prepare the drive or try to repair
it with a third party tool?

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[John Barnes]

Go into your BIOS and make the original drive the first hard drive in BOOT
PRIORITY. Grub is the Linux bootloader, however it got installed.

 

[Guest]

The images very clearly show the bootloader as being grub4dos, which is a
Linux extension. Did you use something to prepare the drive or try to repair
it with a third party tool?

I don't remember making use of such tool and I definitely haven't used any
linux but if this grub appears I'm sure it's been there for very long.
I had WinXP installed on one partition and when I got Vista I installed on
another partition. It worked ok from that day with this menu that let me
choose between Vista or Previous version of windows. But I recall that one
day the post during the boot changed because I had 2 screens of weird lines
(rapidly changing for about 1 sec) coming up after choosing to boot Vista
from that menu until the screen with the loading-progress bar of Vista, lines
that weren't there before. It booted just fine (into both Vista & XP) so I
never worried or asked myself what those lines were. Maybe that was when this
grub came in play but I can't say how it got there.
Anyways the problem is still in place. So what should I do now ? Does
solving my problem depends on grub/linux related knowledge or is there
another way ?
Thanks again for all your help.