Help I lost my HD containing the MBR in a dual boot

I was running a dual boot machine (XP and Vista) with two harddrives.

Vista was loaded on one harddrive and XP on the other. The harddrive containing the XP install failed. Unfortunately this harddrive also contained the master boot record so now I can't even load VISTA (I get an error message saying 'Invalid System Disk....'. I tried to run the recovery from the VISTA disk, but it said it can't fix the problem.

Is there anything I can do so that I can boot to my VISTA install?

Thanks,

Craig

 

I haven't used Vista, but I think you may have to fiddle with the BCD that Vista uses - there are some posts here on that.

There is a graphical BCDedit tool lurking on the web, as I understand that the command line one is abit of handful to use.

Colin

 

I would think that booting to the Vista DVD and doing an automatic or manual boot repair should fix the problem. However, if the drive with Vista on it has Vista on a Logical partition, then it won't be able to fix it. The booting files need to be on a Primary partition (those files were all on the XP drive).

Do you know if your Vista partition is a Primary or Logical partition? If Primary, is it set Active?

 

Hi...

Thanks for the replies. I was able to get the Vista partition working...here is how....

1. I copied the bootmgr file and the boot folder from the root directory of the failed harddrive to the root of the Vista harddrive. Vista was installed into a primary partition on that harddrive.

2. Then I booted using my Vista CD and ran the startup repair. I had to run the repair twice. The first time it built/fixed the system partition, and the second run through it fixed the corrupted BCD info.

Thanks,

Craig

 

Hello:

Glad you solved your dual boot problem.

I'm wondering if dvd / external drive image backups of the partitions would/could have been used to solve this for guys like me who fear to tread into the sys world of files?

BTW, This is not a challenge question