[ben dover101]

did a quick search and found some helpful things to try but still no luck so far so here's what I have going on.

had a new drive and and old drive (with xp on it) in the pc.
loaded vista to the new drive, moved everything over from the old drive and then formatted it. now vista won't boot. threre is no c:\boot on the vista dirve so I can't fix the bcd. I learned all this boot stuff back in tech school but of course I don't remember jack when I really need the knowledge (plus vista is not the same beast as the good ol' windows 9x boot issues)

thanks for any help. I'm going to keep searching as well and see if I find anything else.

[yeshuas]

have you unhidden the files and folders and checked to make sure that the boot folder, and boot.mgr are not on the new drive?

[ben dover101]

have you unhidden the files and folders and checked to make sure that the boot folder, and boot.mgr are not on the new drive?

i'll try and see if I can get it to show up from the command prompt on the vista dvd. I can hook up the drive into my buddies pc later today if I have problems.

[shreader]

Was XP marked as the system drive in Disk Mgr?

You can try if you haven't yet, using the Vista DVD to do a boot repair (choose boot repair instead of install).

[Alt-Tab]

To avoid this problem, i better ask now:

I want to format my XP Drive where the BOOT folder is, since before i got this problem:

Hello, i have a little problem: I have an HD with XP installed, so i mounted a new HD and installed Vista. Vista installation made Boot Manager for me, but the BOOT folder is gone on the XP HD. I didn't knew that, so i wanted to remove XP HD and then VISTA didn't worked, saying DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT A SYSTEM DISK.... So i reboot VISTA with VISTA installation CD and do the following:
bootrec /fixmbr - operation succesfully
bootrec /fixboot - unable to make this operation
bootrec /rebuildbcd - this command does not exist.

I got scarry and put XP HD back, since the previous recovery didn't work, and run PC with VISTA installation disk again. Used the same commands and they all worked fine, i got my vista back without a problem.

My question is: I need to format XP HD but since the BOOT folder is there and i don't want to use BOOT MANAGER neither XP, what should i do?

i'm asking anyone of you what should i do to safely remove boot folder and format my Xp drive without damaging my VISTA.