PCTech Forums

I got a brain teaser for you guys/gals. I am pretty savvy but this one stumped me. I recently reformated my OEM vista desktop 64 bit, and the install was normal. After i installed i did my motherboard drivers, during installation the computer went to restart because of a souns driver that was done. I thought the mobo drivers were done, restarted and closed the install before it finished. Then i get "bootmgr" not found restart.. So i was like.. Ok.. So i atempted a system repair with the win dvd, said said everything was fine. Did a dos repair, everything fine. Wrong, still did it. Reinstalled windows, still did it. Figured out if i left the windows dvd in it, when it said press any key to boot leave it. Windows boots no problem, tryed with different cd. Nope. Windows only, i tryed changing the boot order so that the hdd was first. Nope.. Sooo.. Any ideas?

I fixed it.. incase everyone interested wanted to know it's quite a doodle actually..

Originally my system had a 139gb hard drive installed. Small right? So recently i upgraded to a 1TB Hard drive, i used western digital ghosting software and moved everything over to the new drive and erased the other used the other as a "backup" drive. Cleared it etc.. Found in the disk manager that the old 139 was reading as drive 0 and the 1tb was reading as drive 1. So i switched the cables, now it won't boot.. So i switched them back and never bothered.

Reinstall time.. INstalled the OS on C: Drive (1TB HDD) and kept D: (139GB backup) with all my backup storage on it. After the fresh install, windows kept trying to boot the D: Drive which was drive 0 as the primary drive. No idea whats going on there, or why when the windows DVD was in it bypassed it and went onto the C: Drive.. When i went to do a repair, it was looking at Vista as being installed on Drive D: not C:. So it would always say 0 installs of vista present any time i went to do a repair. But when you pick the drive, it always pointed to drive D: and said it was installed on that drive.

Soooo.. how did i fix it? I unplugged the SATA cable from the 139GB drive, plugged it into the 1TB drive. Then the 1TB Drive into the 139GB drive.. All savvy and works fine.

Anyone want to discuss what happend here? Im stumped why it happend, glad i fixed it.

throughout any of this, did you look at boot settings/first boot device in bios? sounds like some of the later confusion was bios related.

I went up and down the bios when i was diagnosing the problem. I tryed moving the boot order around even tryed excluding things. Don't think it has anything to do with the boot order. Because i ended up reverting it, and it's not a problem now. Like i said, all i did was swap the SATA cables and it works. Just interested in what happend, because i did have my OS on drive 1 instead of drive 0 before.. but now it wants the OS on drive 0.

Hi Nebula

When you use ghost, to image a drive and you are copying from an active drive, there is an issue that comes up when you are finished. Both drives are labeled as active boot drives. At this point, you should shut the system down and disconnect one drive, and reboot. If you don't do it that way, on boot, the second drive gets disabled as an active drive by Windows. It will not be bootable anymore.

The cure, going back to antique DOS, you could run FDISK on the drive in question and make the partition active and it would boot. Otherwise it will only boot from the Window O/S CD.

Hi RY

Never do an install with a second drive attached or any peripherals attached. Some of the computer manufactures use a ribbon cable that has a hole punched in it and used "cable select" setting. It can be very disturbing to install the OS on your data drive by mistake. So the hookup location on the ribbon determines the boot order. It sound like what is happening there.

The other issue if there are two master drives hooked up at the same time, one will never boot again, its active partition gets disabled. fdisk a DOS utility can be used to make it active again.


Your solution, disable the backup drive and see if the primary will boot. Change the drives settings to single and see if it boots. if so, then change it back to master and the other drive to slave and see if it will boot correctly.

If your motherboard is a combo taking sata and pata, you need to mess with the bios settings to get the system to see both.