I have Vista Ultimate installed on my computer with two drives. Vista is
installed on the primary c drive and the secondary d drive contains only
applications and data. I decided to upgrade my secondary drive, so I
copied all the file on the secondary drive to my new drive and then
unplugged my old secondary drive. The problem is, that now Vista will
not boot. If I plug the old drive back in, it'll boot just fine. It
seems that the BCD has a reference to the Windows Boot Manager being on
the D: drive (although, I don't see anything on the D drive) and I can't
figure out how to fix it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.


--
wjousts

Was the replacement drive partitioned when you received it? If so, it may be
tagged as a bootable drive/partition.

There can only be one bootable partition. Having two that are bootable will
cause the system to hang early on right after the P.O.S.T. has been
completed. The computer doesn't know where to go to continue the boot into
the O/S.

The easiest way to solve the problem is to delete all the partitions off the
2nd drive and create a new "logical partition/partitions. This will remove
the boot flag if it exists. You really only want one primary partition for
the operating system. All the rest can be logical partitions.

You can not create logical partitions from within Vista. You will need a
program you can run from a boot CD - such as Acronis Disk manager Suite.

www.acronis.com

--

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP
Windows Desktop Experience


"wjousts" wrote in message
...

I have Vista Ultimate installed on my computer with two drives. Vista is
installed on the primary c drive and the secondary d drive contains only
applications and data. I decided to upgrade my secondary drive, so I
copied all the file on the secondary drive to my new drive and then
unplugged my old secondary drive. The problem is, that now Vista will
not boot. If I plug the old drive back in, it'll boot just fine. It
seems that the BCD has a reference to the Windows Boot Manager being on
the D: drive (although, I don't see anything on the D drive) and I can't
figure out how to fix it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.


--
wjousts

Thanks for the reply Richard. The new drive was not partitioned when I
got it. I originally installed it along side the two old drives so I
could transfer files and I partitioned and formatted it then. But the
problem isn't there. The computer will not boot if the old secondary
drive isn't connected regardless of whether or not the new drive is
connected. When I had only the primary drive connected, I saw the exact
same problem.


--
wjousts

OK

It seems that some, or all, of the boot files ended up on the 2nd older
drive. Now the drive is gone - hence no boot.

Remove all but the primary drive (where Vista is installed). Just unplugging
the cable from the other drives is sufficient.

You then boot from a retail version of the Vista DVD and perform a startup
repair. This will put the necessary boot files on the primary drive. I have
done this numerous times with customers computers and it has usually worked.
Others have not been so successful.

--

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP
Windows Desktop Experience


"wjousts" wrote in message
...

Thanks for the reply Richard. The new drive was not partitioned when I
got it. I originally installed it along side the two old drives so I
could transfer files and I partitioned and formatted it then. But the
problem isn't there. The computer will not boot if the old secondary
drive isn't connected regardless of whether or not the new drive is
connected. When I had only the primary drive connected, I saw the exact
same problem.


--
wjousts

On Fri, 12 Dec 2008 21:07:43 -0600, wjousts
wrote:


I have Vista Ultimate installed on my computer with two drives. Vista is
installed on the primary c drive and the secondary d drive contains only
applications and data. I decided to upgrade my secondary drive, so I
copied all the file on the secondary drive to my new drive and then
unplugged my old secondary drive. The problem is, that now Vista will
not boot. If I plug the old drive back in, it'll boot just fine. It
seems that the BCD has a reference to the Windows Boot Manager being on
the D: drive (although, I don't see anything on the D drive) and I can't
figure out how to fix it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

The specific problem is the Windows System partition (the one
containing the boot manager files) is on the secondary drive, which
the BIOS has to boot to load Vista. To see this run Disk Management
and check the status of the partitions.

The best solution is to make the C drive bootable. Use Disk Management
to mark as active the primary partition on the C drive. Then remove
the secondary drive, and follow steps 2 through 15 at
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windows.vista.general/browse_thread/thread/a434fb8e883bfe76/e44fccdac924c871?hl=en&lnk=st&q=#e44fccdac924c871 ,
ignoring any references to Windows XP.

Thanks for the replies, but it turns out the primary problem was between
the keyboard and the chair. I finally figured out that the drive I was
disconnecting was actually the primary drive and not the secondary. I
guess it was silly of me to assume the one attached to channel 0 would
be the primary!
Anyway, I did find bootmgr and a boot folder on the old D drive (they
were hidden system files) and copied them to C. Disconnected the (right)
secondary drive and now it'll boot just fine.
Rather embarrassing really....


--
wjousts