formatting the MBR

[Fraz]

I have also 'lost' about 4Gb of my hard disk size....it's a 74Gb Raptor and only reports about 70 in partition magic....

Surely this is just a confusion between GB and GiB...

[tommason]

Thanks for all the help everyone

Fixed it!

Searching around on google led me to find a program called 'mbrfix.exe'
You just dump it into the root of c; open up command prompt; choose your drive and type:
mbrfix /drive 1 fixmbr /vista
and in about a second it is done! full of lovely new vista MBR goodness!!

No starting in safe mode/no strange partitioning software

EU-bloody-REKA!

Sorry I'm a little hysterical, this has been bugging me for days

[Fraz]

wahey

That's def a useful program to know about

[charleski]

That's really just the same thing as using fixmbr from the Recovery Console on an XP/Vista disk. I assume you sorted out the problem with your BIOS boot settings.

[tommason]

That's really just the same thing as using fixmbr from the Recovery Console on an XP/Vista disk. I assume you sorted out the problem with your BIOS boot settings.

Yes it is, but with this you can alter the MBR of not JUST the primary drive (which i think you can only do with Fdisk in recovery console?) so you can whack another drive in (from another computer) and sort the problem without rebooting.....

BIOS boot settings? - i worked on your advice (cheers btw!) and removed all the power cables to the other DVD drive and floppy, which seemed to allow the vista CD to boot again...am now reinstalling vista

[aidanjt]

Probably a buggy BIOS when dealing with more than one optical drive.

[kalniel]

The other thing is to check which sata port you're plugging things into. I had no end of greif trying to install vista on a gigabyte mobo a while back - the hard drive would dissappear (from POST too!) as soon as Vista loaded it's own drivers. It was a problem with the jmicron chipset, disabling it in BIOS fixed the problems.