So here's what happened.

First i had one HDD. Then I bought a second one and installed Vista Ultimate. Then I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my first hard drive.
I disabled the Ubuntu drive in the bios so I could try to boot from the Vista one, but it says "Missing Operating System".
I can see the drive in Linux, and all the files are still there.

I've try a couple of different things, but I can't get it it to boot. I've also tried to google it, and a couple people said it was the master boot record, but no fixes worked.

Any suggestions?

Windows puts its boot loader on the first drive it finds even if you then install Vista or XP to a second drive.
Therefore if now you want to boot into Vista you'll need that first drive enabled to do it.

Thanks for replying

I have reenabled my first drive, i'm on it right now with Linux.
Will the "boot loader" even still be there, now that i've installed linux on the drive? If it is, how do i even get to vista? It auto-boots Linux.
Also, I wanted to separate my two harddrives anyway, to put one in a new computer, and keep on in this one. So is there something i could do to make the vista drive independant?

If you put Linux on afterwards its probably trashed the boot loader so now all it'll do is load into Linux.

The other way to do it is to unplug one drive, put Linux on the other drive.
Unplug the now Linux drive, plug in the Vista drive and put Vista on it.
Then use your computer BIOS's boot menu option (typically F12, F8 or F11 on startup) to choose between the two drives.

This way even if one drive does fail the system will still boot into one or the other; it wouldn't be totally unusable.

Hello there, I hope this procedure will help you out. (This procedure does not cause harm in any way, unless you do anything not instructed here.)


1. Make sure your DVD drive boots first in the BIOS.
2. Boot on the Vista DVD. Choose country. Next. Choose keyboard. Next.
3. Don't choose "Install now" but choose "System recovery options". If it is proposed to repair at the end of the search, answer "No". Deselect all lines and click "Next".
4. Choose "command prompt" and try the following three commands:

• bootrec /fixmbr
• bootrec /fixboot
• bootrec /rebuildbcd

This should repair the main boot record, the vista boot loader and the boot configuration.
If the command doesn't work try to type bootrec /? to see if you need to specify something extra, and if you are an advanced user you can look through bcdedit /? too.


Good luck, have fun and enjoy your day!

With kind regards,

Tom

If you want to dual boot you might want to check this guide too:

"How to dualboot Vista with Linux (Vista installed first)" from apcmag.com.

This post has been edited by TomWij: Sep 13 2008, 04:04 AM

I tried those things, but i'm still stuck.

At some point it asks to load drivers for a hard drive, but I just skip it. I dunno if that's important. I can still see my hard drive.

When I try /fixboot it says element not found

When I try /rebuildbcd, It finds the hard drive, I say yes, then i get element not found.

I have no clue what it means.