failed loading operating system

spanks

Distinguished
Apr 6, 2006
33
0
18,530
Hey everyone...I broke it =(

I was following a dual booting guide, and once I got xp installed on the second drive, whenever it tried to boot I get the error failed loading operating system. Well, now that I have formatted the xp harddrive, I still get the error, and am still unable to get into vista. Before that I went onto the startup repair on the vista dvd, and it could not find any errors. I checked the log and it said it loaded into the operating system fine. I really don't want to format the drive, so does anyone have any idea what I could do? I don't have any system restore points through the vista dvd.

I'm not sure what the state of the vista install is in at the moment, but I've installed xp alone on the second harddrive and am running that for now until I can figure out what to do. I can access the vista harddrive and take any files off of it I want. Is there anything I can do on the HDD to fix it?

Thanks guys!
 
Solution
I had a rather interesting situation where I had a second copy of Vista in a backup folder on another drive. It actually started booting with some files from Primary and some from the backup folder. I removed the secondary drive and then it automatically corrected itself. I attached the second drive via USB instead and have had no issues since, so Vista is pretty good at fixing itself when the other OS is not touching it.

chief999

Distinguished
Aug 29, 2007
1
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18,510
Hi, i was suffering the same problem, i managed to solve it by removing the entire second partition on the drive from the vista dvd. once this was removed the pc booted into vista fine, hope this helps.
 

pkellmey

Distinguished
Sep 8, 2006
486
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18,960
I had a rather interesting situation where I had a second copy of Vista in a backup folder on another drive. It actually started booting with some files from Primary and some from the backup folder. I removed the secondary drive and then it automatically corrected itself. I attached the second drive via USB instead and have had no issues since, so Vista is pretty good at fixing itself when the other OS is not touching it.
 
Solution