Gavia

I seem to have done the unthinkable and stupidly tryed to install a second Windows XP after having Windows Vista and Windows XP installed. As soon as my computer restarted after copying the XP setup files, I got confronted by "Error Loading Operating System". I've been searching around the net for about 2 hours now and it led me to a few different methods to try, which i did, but I still can't figure it out.

What I've done so far is put my Vista disc in and hit repair, then tryed the first option to fix the startup, which didn't work. I then went into the CMD option and tryed to fix my boot file. I understand this is done through bcdedit. First I executed "bootsect -NT60 All" and it reset the master boot to be handled by bootmgr but nothing changed except a new symptom appeared. When I restarted. instead of telling me to press a key if I wanted to launch into the DVD, it came up with something to the effect of "CDROM: BOOTMGR MISSING" (I can't remember exactly). Then after restarting it just asked normally if I would like to launch into the DVD, which I did again and this time I went to BCDEdit and deleted the original Windows XP boot details. Now I'm left with just the Windows Vista boot details but the same problem still arises.

When I view the details on Windows Boot Manager through BCDEdit it says that the device is on partition C: (the partition with XP) and the Windows Boot Loader details says that its device and osdevice is on E: (the partition with Vista). My theory is that when launching, the computer looks to drive C: for bootmgr but can't find it because E: is the drive that has Vista on it. I tryed to change the device for Windows Boot Manager to E: but it doesn't make a difference.

As you can see I'm in quite a pickle and any help would be welcome.

Gavia

*Sorry I couldn't figure out how to edit the original post*

An update to what I've done, I just realised that bootmgr is infact in the right place and there really doesn't seem to be any problem. I also re-added Windows XP through BCDEdit but no change.

Gavia

Another update:

I feel that I've now screwed my hard drive over royally. I went into the Vista repair options and through bootsect put the boot handler to ntldr. I then tried to install XP again to a new partition but now when i turn on the computer I can't even get past the BIOS. It gets to the point where it detects the HDDs. It detects both my HDDs, says the status is OK and then just sits there. You can't get into setup or anything. Suspecting that the problem was the HDD, I removed it and put in an old 20GB one I had, installed XP on it and it ran smoothly. I then set the old hard drive as a slave and the same problem appeared. The BIOS would just sit after it said it detected both HDDs and they were OK.

If it helps, my motherboard is an Asus P4P800, the bios is American Megatrend v2.51, I'm using 1.5gb of RAM and I have two identical 160GB Western Digital hard drives. One hard drive works and still has it's files on it (tested it as a slave with the 20gb hdd) but the other HDD just doesn't do squat.

Any and all help is welcome.

PS. I forgot to mention that when I originally tried to install XP, I didn't actually create the partition, i just hit enter on 17gb of unpartitioned space, and then when I tried to install XP again just before, I tried to create a partition on that 17GB and nothing would happen. It would just appear as plain 17GB of unpartitioned space. I ended up creating a 5gb partition after the primary partition which is where i ended with the BIOS just hanging.

mat_d

Hi

Did you fix this? I have stupidly done the same thing and would really appreciate your help.

Thanks

Gavia

Nope sorry man. I ended up corrupting a massive part of my HDD and buying a new one. I was lucky though, a friends MOBO could read my HDD and I managed to get a copy of my important files.