Removed old hard drive with system volume and now boot volume drive not recognized.

hi, i have anold IDE hard drive that i never took out of my computer that had xp on it. i purchased a newSATA drive and installed vista on it a few months ago without taking out the old drive. when i would boot the computer it would give me the option of which OS to boot and i would always just choose vista. i finally removed the old hard drive since i wasnt using it and now my OS will not boot at all. i think that when i originally installed vista on my SATA drive it created the System Volume files on my old IDE drive, while the Boot Volume files are on the SATA drive. now that the old drive is out, my BIOS recognizes my SATA drive that has vista on it but it will not boot vista because i am guessing the System Volume drive is gone. i tried to boot from DVD with the vista dvd so i could repair the startup files and when it has you select the operating system to repair, it did not have any and said that there where no installations of vista to repair. if anyone has any suggestions or solutions i would really appreciate it. thanks in advance.

 

Boot off the vista Cd, go into recovery mode and try the start up repair.



If that doesnt work you may need to get in touch with a WinPE disc and repair the MBR and sector from the command line using bootsect.

 

Did you read the part where he(?) said that he tried to boot off the Vista DVD and it was unable to locate his Vista installation? It's been a while since I did this, but from what I recall, you can't select a command prompt until AFTER WinPE finds your OS installation.



If that's true, booting off the Vista DVD is not going to help him.



Regarding the WinPE disk, exactly how is he going to get one of those? Everything I've read on it provides only instructions about how to create your own -- which he can't because he can't boot into Windows.



OK ... my guess is that Vista is unable to read the hard drive because it's the infamous SATA-IDE driver problem. If the installation was done from inside XP, it worked because Windows was already reading the hard drive via the XP SATA-IDE drivers, and it was able to boot into Vista because it loaded those drivers as part of the Vista installation.



But evidently, the DVD isn't able to load the drivers, so at that point, WinPE is not seeing the hard drive.



Again, it's been a long time since I did this, so I don't remember if there was an F6 option as part of the DVD boot, but if there is, the solution is to obtain the SATA-IDE drivers for the motherboard, burn them to diskette, boot the DVD, press F6 for drivers, load the drivers from diskette, and then -- WinRE should see the Vista installation.



That requires finding out the make and model motherboard, going to the manufacturer's site, downloading the SATA-IDE drivers for that motherboard, and writing them to diskette. It also requires having a diskette drive.

 

I missed that part.



However, you dont even have to press F6, there is a button on the menu to load drivers so it can find the OS.



If people dont keep up with their boot-critical drivers there isnt anything anyone can do for them not having stuff.



He can get a WinPE disc by using a friends PC, or he might own another PC. I didnt expect him to pull it out of thin air.



You also seem to have either no experience with WinPE or you are confusing it with WinRE. You dont have to detect an installation when booting into WinPE. If WinPE doesnt see the disk with the OS on it then he can use the DRVLOAD.exe to load them while inside PE.





Lastly - If i prove you wrong in another thread, following me around in other threads making callous comments only shows immaturity. Its ok to be wrong.

 

I may very well be confusing the two. As I said, in my experience booting from the DVD, unless it finds and recognizes the Vista installation, it doesn't provide you the option of selecting a command prompt to then enter commands. So, is that WinPE or WinRE at work?

 

WinRE



RE runs inside PE as a bootup instance.



You can run WinPE without it, if you create a seperate disc from the WAIK.





Anyway, like i said...he could choose the load drivers button in RE, or in WinPE once hes at the command line he can use DRVLOAD to load the SATA drivers.

 

Did you have to install any drivers or choose between drives when installing Vista the first time? I have confused my harddrives before and formatted an external backup drive. Also try putting the IDE drive back in and see if it works. If it does take it out and then if it does not work then Vista is most likely installed on the IDE drive.

 

thanks for all the replys. i ended up putting the old hard drive back in just so i could boot windows. i did however, try downloading the sata drivers from gigabyte and loading them after booting from the vista installation cd. no luck getting it to recognize the operating system though. any other suggestions? vista definately is installed on the right drive, it just won't let me boot without the old ide drive in the computer.

 

What you've been doing is supposed to work, that is, you're supposed to be able to boot from the Vista DVD and repair your startup files to fix this problem. But, from what you said earlier, when you do boot from the Vista DVD, it is unable to locate the existing Vista installation on your drive -- thus, apparently, you're stuck and can't get any further. Am i right so far?



Suggestions have been provided about using WinPE to work around this problem, but I don't know of any links or locations where you can obtain a ready-built WinPE CD to do that. However, if you can boot into XP or Vista at present, I can provide you a link that will give you the instructions you need for creating your own WinPE CD. With that, you will then be able to boot using WinPE and try the previous suggestions.



Just let me know if you want the link.



P.S. I have a multi-boot, multi-drive system and my Vista DVD, and the Windows Anytime Upgrade CD, also can NOT locate my Vista installation. So, you're not alone in this problem.

 

If he does use WinPE to repair the MBR then it must be a WinPE 2.1 disc made from WAIK 1.1 (this is the newest version and the only one that contains the newest iteration of bootsect.exe with the /mbr switch)

 

sure, if you have a link that would be great. i am in vista now and can burn cd's without a problem. i am not familiar with WinPE though so i may need some instruction after making the CD.

you are correct as to what my problem is. i can boot from Vista DVD but it does not show any OS installations when i click on the repair option so i cannot get any further.

 

OK, here's the link to the article that describes how to make a WinPE CD:



[url]http://searchwincomputing.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid68_gci1297757,00.html [/url]



In that article there's a link for downloading the WAIK.



If you have SP1 installed, you probably want to use this other link for the WAIK:



[url]http://www.microsoft.com/down...6D-15F3-4284-9123-679830D629F2&displaylang=en [/url]



Good Luck