Vista Master Boot Record trouble (involves drive lettering).

[Holy-Promethium]

I had posted this on another forum, but they aren't overly tech-savvy, so I decided to post it here, and hopefully I can get it fixed soonish .

So I'll just copy and paste the various posts:

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Well, I installed Vista earlier on this evening on my brand-spanking new hard-drive. However for some reason it wont allow me to boot up without having the Vista cd in my main cd-drive. (it wont let me boot even with it in the other two).

I have noticed however when I try to get the vista cd to repair it, it refers to it as the D: drive. However in the regedit and the "Computer" (Vista's My Computer) page, its consistently referred to as the C:\ drive.

Anyone tell me how to fix it.

I was thinking it might be the MBR, but for some reason fixboot or fixmbr dont work on the command line thats provided on the repair on Vista.

Thanks in advance.
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This is a quote:

Well normally with a PC to boot from the CD you have to hit a key, so that might not be the problem, but if you enter your BIOS and change boot order to 1.floppy disk (who even has one?) 2.HDD 3.DVDROM might fix it if its a boot order issue.
@Back DT templ: now now don't be rude, we al make some errors, this might not even be the solution
no, not a chance. If I change the boot order so that the cd-rom isnt the first boot up device, it wont even work, I get the error.

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In order to not generate the error I have to:

Get my Boot-Disk order to be

CD-Rom 1st.

Then I have to have my Vista CD in my first cd-drive (the 1st Master).

I reckon the Master Boot Record is just gone to be honest... but I dunno how to fix it in Vista.

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and so the horrors of Microsoft go on.

It turns out, since its referring to my Hard-Drive as D:\ during boot-up.

When I used the repair facility off the Vista Disk, it put the boot partition onto my D:\ drive within Vista.

But no, my Windows version is on the C:\ drive in Vista.

So of course, its not going to work.

Anyone know how to fix that, please?
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Any help you can give me, I'll be very thankful for it.

 

[KSoD]

Okay are you dual booting with XP? Is that why you put this on a 2nd drive instead of the master? That is very important info.

Did you install it right from the DVD? OR did you run it from within XP?

With Vista no matter what if you install it from the DVD Vista will take C drive as it letter. Even if you have XP installed. So when in XP it will say that it is the C drive and Vista is D. But in Vista that will be reversed. Vista will be C and XP will be D.

This can be good since some applications can be run on both this way. They just need the drive letter to be the same. I have been able to run some games and some application right off my XP drive without having to install them.

Let me know that info and i will see if i can continue to help ou out.

 

[Holy-Promethium]

I managed to fix it. Basically I had to remove all of the hard-drives except the one I wanted to install Vista on, format it, install it, then add in the other hard-drives later on.

I had put in one of my older hard-drives from when I was using XP to transfer the files across (all the downloaded game exes from my online-games, and all my web-design psds etc.).

If I didn't take the other hard-drives out, for some reason one of the other hard-drives got labelled as a System drive, so it had the boot folder amongst others on it, while the rest was on the hard-drive I wanted to install it on.

I don't think it was actually possible to fix without formatting and re-installing Vista.