BleepingComputer.com: Vista Ain't Booting

I've been using Vista (Ultimate Edition) since february. A month or so back I moved my Vista installation to a partition of its own on my hitachi deskstar 7k1000. A couple of hours ago a hard drive started making some rather disturbing beeping noises and the computer wouldn't boot up. First I was worried that it'd be my new Hitachi hard drive, but after doing some diagnostics (in the simple manner of plug in/plug out hard drives), I noticed that it was my old Maxtor DiamonMax Plus 9 which had finally drawn its last breath. Oh well, I got it out, no more beeping, but now windows won't start. I've been trying to repair windows with the vista installation disk, but when I'm supposed to select an operating system to repair none is listed. However if I try to load drivers I can browse my vista installation directory just fine (though my Windows Vista partition has for some reason gotten it into its head that it's partition letter is D:). I had been the Maxtor drive as storage for quite some time, but nothing important was lost there. I dunno if this is an important detail, but this Maxtor hard drive was my last IDE hard drive, the rest are SATAs.

So, here's the short version:
1) Hard drive start beeping.
2) Remove beeping hard drive, turns out to be my only IDE drive.
3) When trying to boot the computer again I get: disk boot failure insert system disk and press enter
4) When trying to repair it from the Vista installation DVD it ain't finding my vista installation.
5) My Vista partition now has the partition letter D:

That's it I think... any help would be appreciated.

From what I've seen on my own Vista Ultimate... the Maxtor 'storage' just plain doesn't like the moving of files. I'm still researching this, especially with defragging

Do a clean re-install of Vista.

Jacee, on Dec 1 2007, 05:54 AM, said:

Well, seeing how my Vista is installed on the Hitachi hard drive I mentioned earlier and I've already removed the Maxtor hard drive (which was used very little if at all), I don't think the Maxtor should have any effect on this problem, unless a comlete lack of IDE hard drives can somehow screw up the boot manager?

Edit: I have however decided that doing a complete re-install might be a good idea anyways... always such a fun thing to do

Edit 2: When trying to install Vista I'm getting a "Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installtion." message... bummer!

"Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installtion." is still stonewalling me. I've tried formatting the partition I want Vista installed to, tried loading the sata drivers from the MBs (Asus Striker Extreme) homepage, tried using diskpart to make the partition active... all with no luck. Seems installing Vista with no IDE hard drives is not very nice. Any ideas of how to solve this problem would be very much appreciated.

Edit: Managed to solve this by removing all hard drives except the one I wanted to install Vista on... interesting solution but it worked.

Windows appears to prefer IDE to SATA. I've seen a lot of instances of this with XP, but haven't actually tried it with Vista.

All of my personal Vista installations are on systems with only SATA drives (with the exception of my laptop - which only has 1 IDE drive). I've installed a lot of Vista installations at work on both SATA only and IDE only systems without any issues. It seems to me that its the mix of IDE and SATA that makes things screwy.

FWIW - I last installed a Windows OS on a "mixed" system quite some time ago. The installation (it was a clean install) went smoothly and I was up and running in no time. The boot process remained nearly as slow as it was before I added the SATA drive - and since I had installed the OS to the new SATA drive (a 10,000 rpm model), I figured that the boot process should have been faster.

So I started to research it - and after a lot of hair-pulling I found that Windows (XP) had installed a boot sector on the old IDE drive. After some more research I figured that the easiest way was to remove all hard drives except for the new SATA drive and then install Windows. After this I checked and was reassured to find the boot sector on the SATA drive. I then powered down and re-attached the IDE drive and everything worked just fine.