So yea, I had 8 HDD's and Windows Vista Installed. I removed 2 IDE drives and now I'm not getting any boot sequence or anything. I knew that Windows was stupid but to not put the bootloader on the HDD that it was installed on seems beond belief. So is there a way to re-install a bootloader to boot the Windows Vista I have on The HDD with Vista on it? (It also has XP but I can make that boot with EasyBSD) Next time I install Vista (Peferable Win7) I will unhook all my other Data HDD's before I install.
fdisk /mbr used to do it but uhh I haven't had to really work on a Vista system so for the love of god don't take my word for it. Works perfectly on XP, 2k and 98 systems though.
What happened is quite simple, you removed the HDD where the bootloader was (which is not necessarily the disk where Windows is installed, most of the times is the first IDE disk). Anyway I had that trouble on Vista once and it's pretty easy to fix. Boot from the Vista disc, go to a command prompt and run FIXMBR, that should fix it. If you keep getting trouble after that, the MBR got installed in the wrong drive. In that case try to boot from different disks (you can access boot menu pressing F9 or F11 in most of he BIOSes), when you find out in which disk is the MBR installed enter the BIOS setup and set it as the first boot device (after CDROM).
I've not had to much experience with a failed bootloader but i know someone who did and the following seemed to work for them so its worth a try. To repair MBR/bootloader boot into your vista cd/dvd and after selecting language/input hit reapir and then select your OS, from there goto command prompt and type the following underlinded peices in order: Bootrec /FixMbr then Bootrec /FixBoot Bootrec /ScanOs Then Bootrec /RebuildBcd Restart your comp then load up your vista cd/dvd and get into the command prompt again as above but this time Type boot\bootsect.exe /60 ALL You'll need to then copy the Boot manager from the root of your vista dvd to your partition you need it on which in any normal case would be c: so you'd type xcopy bootmgr c:\ Then restart the computer. *Make sure you put spaces were shown and i'd also use caps were shown as i'm not sure if its case sensetive or not. Hopfully this is helpful to you and it works but i can't be sure as i've never had to do this myself.
Thanks guys, I used everything you said with some alterations. I hooked up the drive to my laptop (the IDE one) and copied anything over that could be used for booting bootmgr/boot directory. And then burned the xcopied over. Then I used the DVD to fix n repair
I'm having the same issue, I had Windows XP Professional SP3 installed on a 200GB HDD, and I also had an 80GB HDD. Being the 200GB one the master and the 80GB the slave. I made a 3GB primary partition in the 80GB one, installed XP on that partition, and left the other part as logical, where I stored a backup of files I had in the 200GB HDD. Then I tried to format the 200GB HDD and convert it to a logical drive using Partition Magic 8.0, it had to reboot after doing it's work, and when it rebooted, I encountered a GRUB ERROR 22. Tried copying i386/ntldr to C: and i386/ntdetect.com from the XP Boot CD, then went to the Repair Console and run FIXMBR and FIXBOOT on both disks, and also tried tampering with the booting order but nothing happened. If I select the 200GB one to be the first booting device, it says it can't boot and that I have to restart and choose a bootable device, which would be logical as it is empty, but when I choose the 80GB HDD I keep getting the GRUB ERROR 22. Dunno what to do now... Oh, another thing, sometimes when it boots it starts checking the network card, and it does it twice..
Already tried that, the 80GB disk with XP is supposedly IDE-1, I've tried setting it as the first boot device and also disabling other boot devices just in case but end up with the same error. I'm gonna give it a try with Super Grub Disk. Damn its 4:48AM :banghead:
And voila! Super Grub Disk did the job, after a couple of minutes trying some stuff I could uninstall the GRUB and install a bootloader and fix the problem, at least for now.
