Vista problem or bad hard drive?

Varroa · February 21st, 2008, 03:12 PM

Ok, I need a little help with this one. I have a dual boot setup (XP/Vista) and everything was working fine. Then the other day I go to boot into Vista and there was nothing! Now before you say it is the latest patch from MS you must read the rest of my post. What I mean by nothing is when I choose Vista in the boot loader the screen goes black and there is not hard drive activity, no cursor, nothing. I tried everything I could think of to fix it (boot from Vista CD and use repair console, spinrite, disk check, etc) but nothing worked. Spinrite came up with a error saying "cannot read from disk, the bios may be blocking full access.....". Oh, in XP I could access the drive and see everything on it and write/erase to the drive. So, I decided to format the Vista drive and start from scratch. I removed all partitions, added new ones and installed Vista again. During the first re-boot during install it came to boot loader and when it started to load Vista THE SAME THING HAPPENED AGAIN

. I have tried everything I can think of and no matter what I try Vista will not boot! Is the drive pooched or am I missing something? Thanks in advance.

P.S. the harddrive is a WD 500Gig Sata drive with 16mb cache, about 2 weeks old.

**Chaos** · February 21st, 2008, 04:52 PM

have you tried deleting the current partition that is on the drive, then create a new primary partition and do a fresh format the new partition before installing Vista again

Varroa · February 21st, 2008, 05:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chaos

have you tried deleting the current partition that is on the drive, then create a new primary partition and do a fresh format the new partition before installing Vista again

Yes, before I re-installed Vista I did a complete format of the drive and added new partions, formated those new partition and installed Vista. I ended up with the same result.

**Chaos** · February 21st, 2008, 05:33 PM

that sucks, have you tried the load driver option during the first part of the Vista install and added SATA drivers for the WD HD

Varroa · February 21st, 2008, 06:00 PM

No I didn' try tjhat since the fist time I installed the OS it ran fine on the drive.

xiaomhome · February 21st, 2008, 11:17 PM

Are you using grub or lilo????
If you installed XP and Vista in the same machine Windows will install its bootloader (NTDL) in the first partition or the first bootable ntfs/fat bootable partition, so if you're trying to boot vista directly from vista partition you wont have success, instead try booting XP partition then modify your init file -i can't remember its file name - (the one that points where the MS OSes are installed, if you installed Vista after XP then it should be working). With some good googling around you should be able to workaround this.