Vista not booting...

[FatalSaviour]

Hey guys...
I'm hoping someone can help me out with this...

I installed Vista on my RAID 5 array when Beta 2 was released to the CPP.
It's been running fine....but wasn't stable/complete enough for me to use as my main OS (which is fair enough - it's Beta after all) so I installed XP on a secondary HD.

This actually corrupted completely after a few days...not entirely sure what happened, but the only thing I can come up with is a faulty graphics driver install...anyway, the lot went south...but not a problem...nothing important on there...

I reinstalled XP, but I now have a problem...my BIOS is still set to boot from the RAID array first, but the Vista bootloader seems to have gone walkabouts...is this contained in the boot.ini file in the root directory?
If so, I seem to be missing mine now...is there any simple way to get this back?

While I'm on the subject, is it then possible to edit it to select between booting Vista on this array, and XP on the secondary drive?

TIA for all your help guys...I'm sure I should be able to manage it on my own atm, but work's pretty hectic atm, and I lack the brainpower atm to sort it out :S.

Cheers

[FatalSaviour]

Bumpage...Mr. Adams, I'm looking in your direction...

Having done a minute amount of reading, it's my understanding that they did away with the original boot.ini files, Vista doesn't use the ntldr Windows NT boot loader, and has got it's own Bootmgr.exe now...so I'm rather at a loss now

[Paul Adams]

Okay, summary with questions:
- RAID5 set with Vista Beta 2 installed
- separate disk with XP installed
- BIOS configured to boot from RAID set

Q1 - at this point was the system multi-booting from the Vista boot loader, or were you hitting an 'F' key during the POST to select the XP OS?

My guess is that you installed XP with no drivers for the RAID set, so it only saw the separate disk to install to - and subsequently prepared this disk as active and put the system and boot files on here.
This would mean that the system by default would continue to boot into Vista unless instructed otherwise.

Later, you installed the RAID drivers into XP so see all the disks, then when you did a repair or re-install of XP you had visibility of the RAID set - so this time it saw the "real" boot loader to update and scrubbed it with the XP MBR & boot sector, pointing to NTLDR.

Yes indeed, the Great Bootini is now obsolete for Vista, but the new boot manager is backwardsly-compatible - what you need to do is boot from the Vista installation media and look in the bottom left corner on the "Install now" screen, where you will see a "System recovery options" link.
As with the installer, you get to load the drivers necessary to see the RAID disks.

This is now wizard-based and fairly automated to do routine health checks and fixes, hopefully it will say "aha! this 'ere boot manager ain't mine! lemme fix...".
Now - whether this will be smart enough to make the Vista boot manager multi-boot and present a "previous version of Windows" option pointing to XP I don't know.

It might be worth disconnecting the separate disk or just disabling in the BIOS to simplify the wizard's job, as it may see it as the first active disk and try to "fix" the boot manager there instead, which you aren't booting off - this would make the separate disk the system volume and the RAID set the boot volume.
(This is actually how mine at home is configured, which is handy for me as I want to select via the BIOS when to boot into the beta OS instead of munging the boot managers together.)

RAID sets are tricky things to virtualise for testing & troubleshooting unfortunately, and as they aren't "native" like simple PATA disks we are at the mercy of the vendors supplying working drivers to bundle.