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Vista Won't Boot Without Disk in Drive?

X

x2ms

Member
Hi, I've just upgraded my computer to Windows Vista Ultimate, and I?m having a problem that I didn?t have with XP. I'm using a Shuttle SD37P2 small form factor case with three hard disks and a CD drive. I have two SATA data disks and one SATA raptor that I'm using as the install disk. The CD drive is IDE, but the motherboard aligns all the disks into two channels. The point being that the CD drive is the first device on the first channel for the motherboard. I believe that this is what causes the problem.
The Vista install works properly, and Windows works fine after the install. The issue is that the Vista DVD must be in the drive for the computer to boot. If the DVD is not in the drive, the message "Disk Boot Failure, insert system disk and press enter"? is displayed by the BIOS. It appears that the MBR is never written to the disk, no order of hard disks or boot priorities fix this issue. This was not an issue with XP.
The boot loader is installed to the disk properly; I've used BCDEdit to verify that the paths are correct. The problem lies within the MBR. What I think is happening is that when Vista installs, it sees the MBR on the DVD drive (because it is the first device in the system) as read-only, and thus fails to write the Vista-specific MBR. Booting from the DVD but not pressing a key causes the MBR on the DVD to hand off to the disk, where the Vista boot loader picks up. Using the startup repair utility yields nothing successful, all tests say the system should boot fine.
Any thoughts or insight would be great, thanks!
 
I am having the exact same issue. I believe the solution (which I am going to try tonight) is to unplug the IDE drives and run Vista's boot repair from the installation CD. The Vista setup will install the boot loader to your IDE drive's MBR even when you choose the SATA drive, so if you remove the IDE drive and repair using Vista CD it should have no choice but to install the boot loader onto the SATA drive's MBR.

My setup if you are interested: I have 2 IDE drives and 2 SATA drives. IDE drives have nothing on them and 1st SATA has Vista. In my BIOS, it allows me to set the overall boot device priority as well as the priority within each device.
Overall device priority: CDROM, Hard Drive, Removable
CD-ROM Priority: Plextor DVD burner, Samsung DVD burner (both SATA)
Hard Drive Priority: SATA1 (WD Raptor), SATA2 (Seagate), IDE1 (Maxtor), IDE2 (Maxtor)

Right now I cannot boot Vista unless I put the Windows Vista CD in and NOT press anything when it says "Press a key to boot from CD", somehow this allows the system to search for and find the proper hard drive (SATA1) to boot from. I haven't tried this yet but I'm pretty sure that if I re-order my hard drive boot order and placed IDE1 as the first one, I can boot the system correctly without having to leave the Vista CD in the drive. I am going to try what I mentioned up top tonight and that will hopefully be a permanent solution.
 
Originally posted by: thesaint37
I am having the exact same issue. I believe the solution (which I am going to try tonight) is to unplug the IDE drives and run Vista's boot repair from the installation CD. The Vista setup will install the boot loader to your IDE drive's MBR even when you choose the SATA drive, so if you remove the IDE drive and repair using Vista CD it should have no choice but to install the boot loader onto the SATA drive's MBR.

My setup if you are interested: I have 2 IDE drives and 2 SATA drives. IDE drives have nothing on them and 1st SATA has Vista. In my BIOS, it allows me to set the overall boot device priority as well as the priority within each device.
Overall device priority: CDROM, Hard Drive, Removable
CD-ROM Priority: Plextor DVD burner, Samsung DVD burner (both SATA)
Hard Drive Priority: SATA1 (WD Raptor), SATA2 (Seagate), IDE1 (Maxtor), IDE2 (Maxtor)

Right now I cannot boot Vista unless I put the Windows Vista CD in and NOT press anything when it says "Press a key to boot from CD", somehow this allows the system to search for and find the proper hard drive (SATA1) to boot from. I haven't tried this yet but I'm pretty sure that if I re-order my hard drive boot order and placed IDE1 as the first one, I can boot the system correctly without having to leave the Vista CD in the drive. I am going to try what I mentioned up top tonight and that will hopefully be a permanent solution.
Click to expand...

Did this work? Got the same problem.
 
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