[DanZaMan4251]

Hello, I woke up this morning and tried to boot my computer and it sais
"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware. Please check the windows documentation about hardware disk configeration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information."
what do i do, i need it up and running ASAP!!!
I don't care if i have to clean install bc everything is backed up. It cannot start from a disk. I went into BIOS to try and restore to previous state but it only shows windows xp professional, which i uninstalled a week ago. I am running vista home premium 500GB sata HD, 2GB Ram dual monitors and 2 dvd burners. My os dosn't show up on os choice menu, only XP. My comp cant start from a cd, even after messing with BIOS to run a recovery software. Help ME PLEASE!!!

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I only have a few quick ideas here, but one of them may work. First, if you have multiple HDD's, then unplug all but the one you know the OS is installed on, Vista may well have mixed up the drive letters, and be looking on the wrong drive for the boot loader. Alternatively, if you only have the 500Gb drive, unplug your optical drives just to be sure. If you don't have any luck with that, then plug in one of the optical drives, and see if you can set it up in the BIOS to look to the optical drive first to boot, and it SHOULD give you the option of booting from either your Vista or XP CD. Alternatively, I don't know if this will work if you are working with an upgrade disk... Other than that, I would say your best bet, if you can't get to the recovery console, would be to have whatever backup program you use make a bootable state of itself on a flash drive, and try booting into that, so you can at least restore. Additionally, if you have a spare HDD kicking around, try installing windows on that, and using the checkdisk utility to ensure your 500Gb drive is in running order, a bad sector could well be screwing you here as well. Hope this helps!

[StewBizzle]

I only have a few quick ideas here, but one of them may work. First, if you have multiple HDD's, then unplug all but the one you know the OS is installed on, Vista may well have mixed up the drive letters, and be looking on the wrong drive for the boot loader. Alternatively, if you only have the 500Gb drive, unplug your optical drives just to be sure. If you don't have any luck with that, then plug in one of the optical drives, and see if you can set it up in the BIOS to look to the optical drive first to boot, and it SHOULD give you the option of booting from either your Vista or XP CD. Alternatively, I don't know if this will work if you are working with an upgrade disk... Other than that, I would say your best bet, if you can't get to the recovery console, would be to have whatever backup program you use make a bootable state of itself on a flash drive, and try booting into that, so you can at least restore. Additionally, if you have a spare HDD kicking around, try installing windows on that, and using the checkdisk utility to ensure your 500Gb drive is in running order, a bad sector could well be screwing you here as well. Hope this helps!

[DanZaMan4251]

ok, i got it to boot from a disk (I had to unlplug all my HD's and then plug them in after cd loaded) Im formatted the whole drive and im installing xp. i plan to make a partition and install vista on the other partition, then restore my vista data bc i had it backed up. thanks. (please leave this topic open incase i run into errors)