winload.exe keeps getting hosed - second time

[BigK]

I upgraded my laptop to Vista from XP MCE. I did a clean install on one
partition so I am not dual booting at all.

For the second time now my installation has gotten screwed. It keeps saying
that the windload.exe is corrupt or not available. I have found some sites
that say I need to fix it with bcdedit but that would not work. I have
tried the repair feature from the boot/install disk to no avail. I did not
have time to call MS because I had to get some work done so I just reimaged
the XP back onto it. But is there some known problem or fix that I could
get help so that I can confidently upgrade again? At this point I am likely
going to have to just suck it up and call MS for a refund because I don't
want to reload and have this happen again.

 

[Richard Urban]

You have two hard drives, correct? You have/had an operating system on the
other hard drive, right? That being the case, the other hard drive has an
active primary partition on it. There can only be one active partition - for
the system you wish to boot.

I have seen this a few times and each time I have been able to solve the
condition using Acronis Disk Director to deactivate the other primary
partition. Then the computer will boot into Vista just fine.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[BigK]

You have two hard drives, correct? You have/had an operating system on the
other hard drive, right? That being the case, the other hard drive has an
active primary partition on it. There can only be one active partition -
for the system you wish to boot.

I have seen this a few times and each time I have been able to solve the
condition using Acronis Disk Director to deactivate the other primary
partition. Then the computer will boot into Vista just fine.

Thanks for the reply.

Would this even be the case with a USB drive. I removed the USB drive and
it still would not boot saying the winload.exe file was missing or corrupt.