Help! Vista won't boot from HDD

[tigerfootball05]

So Today I decided to install vista on my main computer. I changed the Boot sequence to CD first, then HDD. Everything ran fine and vista seemingly loaded perfectly. After moving some files from my backup drive back onto my main one and installing some drivers, I was asked to restart my computer (for the drivers) so I did. Remembering that the boot sequence was still set on CD first, and since my driver CD was still in the drive, I decided to set the boot sequence back to the way I had it with XP: HDD and then CD. After doing this I quit BIOS and tried to boot, but I kept getting a message saying: DISK BOOT FAILURE. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENETER.

So I restarted the computer again, this time with my Vista CD in the drive, and again, the computer wouldn't boot and told me to enter a boot disk. Not knowing what to do, I went back into BIOS and changed the boot sequence back to CD first, then HD. After doing this, and restarting with the Vista CD in the drive, my computer booted up with no problems whatsoever. I tried reinstalling Vista (twice), reformatting the target hard drive, changing the boot sequence around, pretty much everything I could think of.

The only thing that seemed fishy about the installation process was that when it asked me to choose a drive to install windows one, my data/backup drive (200gb) was labeled as Disk 0 and tagged as primary, while my target drive (80gb) was labeled as Disk 1 and also tagged as Primary. Would changing my backup drive to something other than primary? Will doing that erase all of my files on it? I also read somewhere that the fact that my target HDD is RAID/SATA could play some part in the problem. Is this true?

I guess my overall question is, why wouldn't it boot from my HD, and how can I get it back to normal? Thanks in advance for the help!

[Alvin.C]

Hello,

In the BIOS when you were changing the boot order sequence, did you choose the correct hard drive to be the primary boot device?

[tigerfootball05]

Yes, the target hard drive (which should have Vista on it) is listed as number one in the boot order. Someone mentioned I should try using the bootrec.exe utility in windows recovery mode, but I have no idea what any of those options mean (what will /fixmbr do? What is an mbr anyways?). Would it hurt to mess around with those options anyways?

[atomic tofu]

you may need to fiddle with some bios settingsm, ie., turning off or on some features...

was your larger aux drive an external or internal? I have an ESATA drive, connected via esata, sometimes I forget to turn it on soon enough or sometimes my bios forgets the order, because the esata is actually at position 0, which us 1st. When this occurs, I get an ntldr error....

[EricB]

for some reason you have not made a boot record of vista. with your vista cd in (and set to boot from cd), it will directs you to the vista path without you hitting a key to boot from cd.

xp would do the same thing if it had no boot path.

boot into vista and ask makeveli213 how to make a vista boot path. I could help you if it was xp