Oh jesus Vista upgrades

denihilist

Before my upgrade to Vista I had two SATA drives in my box

80 gig w/XP install
160 gig Media drive

I have an extra 250 gig drive but as I only have two SATA ports, I hadn't installed it. So I get the idea to do some swapping while upgrading to Vista. Turn the Media drive into my Vista install, put the 250 into my box and mothball the 80. Sounds good right?

So I backup my media to an external usb. Wipe the 160 and install Vista to it. Everything goes well, I run in dual boot for a week to get all of my info transfered over. Last night I put my components into a new case, mothballed the 80 gig drive and was ready to start moving my media to the 250 gig drive, or so I thought because I kept getting boot disc errors.

So I thought I fucked the Vista drive during the case swap or worse, messed up the mobo. So I put the 80 gig back in by itself and I get prompted to choose a version of windows. XP boots fine. If I put the 160 in with Vista, I can boot into Vista.

What am I missing here?

Pheezer

Is the 250 gig pinned for Master?

Because if it is, then your motherboard is probably ignoring the presence of the other drive completely

And there's no OS on the 250 gig drive now is there

Pheezer

Basically I'm saying you need to double and triple check your jumpers on both drives and play with using cable select vs. using one set to master and the other set to slave to get them to both show up correctly in BIOS. Once you've got that sorted, also check your boot order settings. With those all in line, then I can't imagine what could possibly cause this.

denihilist

SATA doesn't look at jumpers...

denihilist

And I've checked boot order in the bios. Both drives show up in the bios as well. It's fucking weird is what it is.

Drez

This happened to me when I installed Vista RC-somethingorother (yes, legitimately).

I still have not fixed the issue properly. Sorry if that's not especially helpful, but I figured I would let you know that it doesn't appear to be a unique issue. I never really cared too much to fix it but there must be info out there on tech sites somewhere if no one here can help.

edit: In fact, WinXP won't even allow me to format my Vista drive. And if I disconnect the Vista drive I cannot boot into WinXP. Two completely separate installations. It's very weird. It's like Vista somehow attached itself like a barnacle to my WinXP installation.

denihilist

Well that is a little comforting. I guess I'll be digging through Microsoft's Knowledge Base...awesome.

Pheezer

Okay, so I'm clearly completely out of date. Shit.