Vista dual boot issues (XP drive died)

[Krosus]

So, bit of an odd situation I have walked into.

Started a job a few months back where the previous IT guy had setup a dual boot of Xp / Vista on all the office machines after adding a second hard disk to them all for some reason. Well to cut a long story short, one of the machines had it's XP based HD fry and being as everyone has been commanded from on high to use Vista I just removed the XP HD.

When I went to boot the machine with only the Vista HD it doesn't see it as bootable media, I tried running the vista repair tool but it doesn't see the vista HD as having an OS installed even after loading SATA controller drivers and browsing the drives it sees the Vista drive fine. So I tried just doing the startup repair without selecting an OS and it didn't work either.

At this point I am getting a bit annoyed and its 8pm I want to go home ^, I boot up another machine and check out the computer management section from admin tools and even booted into Vista it shows the XP HD as the system drive.
I tried Bootloader pro on the perfectly functioning machine and it doesn't even think Vista is installed and I cannot for the life of me work out why Vista thinks the old XP install is the system drive and no programs even see Vista as installed execpt BCDedit.exe.

So anyone have any ideas on how to remove the XP drive dependency and make the Vista drives bootable?

 

[BadBigBen]

Vista most likely got installed on a Extended Partition, meaning that the drive is NON booting (as you confirmed it)...

I would try and Ghost the install over to a primary (active) partition (on a new drive), then run the BOOT repair of Vista on it...



Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

 

[Ante0]

From dos, try format /mbr
could be that it installed the master boot record to the XP drive, and cleared the Vista one.
Its worth a shot anyhow, if you can get a bootable cd that can "see" the Vista drive.

 

[linney]

Vista uses a hidden system file called Bootmgr, and a hidden folder called Boot, to successfully boot. It sounds like these files were on the XP drive. I would have expected the Startup Repair tool to have fixed that problem for you.

Have you tried the FixMbr equivalent command?

How to use the Bootrec.exe tool in the Windows Recovery Environment to troubleshoot and repair startup issues in Windows Vista

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392#appliesto

Vista's Startup Repair.

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/5c59f8c1-b0d1-4f1a-af55-74f3922f3f351033.mspx#EX