[jaymrobinson]

I'm having some bad problems. Let me explain. I have upgraded my machine to Vista Home Premium from Windows XP Home. I made a clean install on my d: drive. All of the bootmgr and boot info went on the c: drive containing my XP installation. All good, no problems. I had the option to boot XP or Vista on start. Later I tried to install Windows 2003 Server on a 3rd hard disk (bad idea). I had problems with the installation, and decided to quit it. Well, Windows 2003 server (being older than Vista) installed over the MBR on my c: drive rendering me unable to boot Vista anymore. Well, I tried a lot of stuff, including the bootsect, bootrec utilities to try to restore the Vista compatible MBR on the c: drive. This did not work. I tried putting a MBR on my Vista drive (d but I couldn't boot from there. Then I used the diskpart utility to set the active partition on my vista (d drive. Then when I rebooted my computer my BIOS no longer recognized my XP (c drive, and of course I was still unable to boot Vista as well. I'm kinda screwed now that I have no OS. Does anybody know why my BIOS would all of a sudden not recognize my XP drive anymore? Any advice? Thanks ahead of time as any info would be useful. (By the way, my XP and Vista disks are both legitimate, both Upgrade versions)

[DaveBurnett]

Easy. Just start the installation of Vista again from the DVD.
At some point it will ask you if you want to repair the Booting. Do it!
It will repair all the boot info and give you the correct options, although you may have a ghost 2003 in the list.

[jaymrobinson]

I was finally able to fix the problem on my Vista drive. It was not easy though.
The automatic boot repair feautures on the installer did not work. So this is what I ended up doing.

1) I used the "bootsect /nt60 /all" command to create the MBR on the disk drive.
2) I manually copied the bootmgr file to the Vista hard disk root directory. (It was not there because the booter was on the other hard disk.)
3) I manually created a BCD store using BCDedit.
4) Then you have to import the store using BCDedit in order to make it the system store.
5) I used the "bootrec /rebuildbcd" command, and it automatically set the store to boot Vista.

I was surprised and relieved when it actually worked, because this disk was never set up to boot from at all. Maybe this will help someone somewhere having the same sort of problem.