Vista won't boot without CD

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tigerfootball05

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So I had to reinstall vista on my main computer. I changed the Boot sequence to CD first, then HDD. Everything ran fine and vista seemingly loaded perfectly. After moving some files from my backup drive back onto my main one and installing some drivers, I was asked to restart my computer (for the drivers) so I did. Remembering that the boot sequence was still set on CD first, and since my driver CD was still in the drive, I decided to set the boot sequence back to the way I had it with XP: HDD and then CD. After doing this I quit BIOS and tried to boot, but I kept getting a message saying: DISK BOOT FAILURE. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER.

So I restarted the computer again, this time with my Vista CD in the drive, and again, the computer wouldn't boot and told me to enter a boot disk. Not knowing what to do, I went back into BIOS and changed the boot sequence back to CD first, then HD. After doing this, and restarting with the Vista CD in the drive, my computer booted up with no problems whatsoever. I tried reinstalling Vista (twice), reformatting the target hard drive, changing the boot sequence around, pretty much everything I could think of.

I went into the system recovery options, ran bootrec.exe/fixMbr, /fixboot, and /scanOS. None of these options fixed the problem, although I noticed that the /scanOS function told me it could find NO Vista installations...I'm 100% sure that Vista is installed on my HD, but for some reason it isn't recognized. What am i doing wrong?

Another thing that seemed fishy about the installation process was that when it asked me to choose a drive to install windows on, my data/backup drive (200gb) was labeled as Disk 0 and tagged as primary, while my target drive (80gb) was labeled as Disk 1 and also tagged as Primary. I've set the boot order to check my target drive (Disk 1) first so this shouldn't affect anything, just something weird I noticed.

I guess my overall question is, why wouldn't it boot from my HD, and how can I get it back to normal? Thanks in advance for the help!
 
I would wager to guess that since you are placing the boot sequence to the HDD that has XP that isnt the drive that contains your boot info which is why you keep getting this error. You need to point the BIOS to the drive that has Vista installed on it which now contains the boot info for Vista so that your system will boot from the hard drive first.
 
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