goatboy

evening one and all...

ive got problems, so here goes;

i have(had) a completely fully working and fine install of XPMCE 2005 on one of my SATA drives. i recently bought vista ultimate 32bit oem and a shiny new SATA drive to install it on.

to install vista i disconnected all or my existing SATA and IDE drives so that only the new SATA drive was connected. vista installed fine, 20 minutes from first boot to desktop.

once vista was running and had suitably updated itself i shut the system down and connected my old drives and booted the sytem, vista loaded just fine and detected the new drives... all good so far.

so i accessed my drives and installed various apps and utilities, copied over my documents etc, generally starting to put vista through its paces.

anyway, time came to run up xp so that i could do a quick bit of work before calling it a night, so i rebooted the system and then on reboot pressed F8 to select the boot drive (this is how i did things when i was running the Beta and RC1 of vista), selected the drive with XP on it and pressed enter...

xp wont boot, the system posts as normal but thats it, then i just get the blinking _ no error messages or notes, just _!

so that you know at which point i mean - this is at the point where you would be told you have an invalid system disk if that was the case.

i have tried disconnecting all drives apart from the one with xp on it, all to no avail - it just will not boot.

just to reiterate, this is not a dual boot setup, these are completely isolated installs on different physical drives and i am using the motherboard to choose which drive to boot into, i have been running this setup for over a year now, at one point i had xp, vista rc1 and linux installed on 3 different drives and would use the boot selector if i wanted to boot into a different os (xp was the default).

any help on this would be greatly appreciated... has vista stuck something on that drive that has buggered the boot bit (not the correct terms im sure)? if so then thank **** it did not do it when i was installing the Beta and RC1 versions!

Thanks in advance,

Martin

-----------------------------------------
System Spec;

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3700+
RAM: 2GB OCZ Platinum PC3200
Mobo: Asus A8NSLI Premium
Gfx: NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX
Snd: Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music
HDD1: Hitachi Deskstar 250GB SATA II - XP Media Center Edition 2005
HDD2: Hitachi Deskstar 250GB SATA II - Vista Ultimate
HDD3/4/5: MAXTOR & Western Digital IDE Drives - file storage and backup

dai

the master boot record is always on the first drive usually C
if you have five hard drives all with an op sys. the boot record for all will be on the first drive
vista uses a different boot loader to xp and overwrites it
during beta testing at first i used to disconnect the xp drive while loading vista
after a couple of months i had had enough and just went with vista

__________________