I installed a secondary 1TB SATA drive earlier today, and, wanting to keep up to date technology wise, have created a partition on it for Windows Vista.
The hard drive itself is working fine, reads, writes, makes lovely whirring sounds, but Vista just won't work correctly on it.
Booted from my Vista disc, went through the installation stuff, selected my newly formatted partition for Vista, the installer did its bit, no issues there, then it said I needed to restart.
Computer restarts, boot loader appears, goes to automatically load Vista, then the problem strikes. I get a message saying that the file "\Windows\System32\winload.exe" is missing or damaged, and that Windows can't start. Error code is 0xC000000E. Pressing F8 for advanced options just gives me the same error, no menu. XP still boots fine though when I select it.
Googling turned up a whole host of things, but the solution was apparently to check your drive letters. Now comes the complex bit for normal humans to understand, I think. My drive setup is as follows (blame the default setup on these Dell computers):
XP Drive - C:
DVD Drive - D:
Built-in Card Reader - E:, F:, G: and H:
Data partition - I:
Vista partition - J:
Network drive - L:, N:, S:, V:
Following Google's advice, I jumped into XP, loaded up the command prompt, and navigated my way to the bcdedit.exe program.
There, I noticed that the boot loader assumed Vista was installed on drive J:. Now, there is a file in my Vista partition's root folder called $DRVLTR$, which contains the following bit of code:
[445afa08-0b90-4c6b-ad29-04e626d565c4] DrivePath=E:\
This makes me think that Vista hasn't read the card reader, and assumes it's on drive E:, as opposed to J:. Also, changing that to "DrivePath=J:\" solved nothing.
Also, if it helps, here's my printout from bcdedit.exe:
J:\Windows\System32>bcdedit.exe /enum
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
device partition=C:
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {globalsettings}
default {default}
displayorder {ntldr}
{default}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 3
Windows Legacy OS Loader
------------------------
identifier {ntldr}
device partition=C:
path \ntldr
description Microsoft Windows XP
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {default}
device partition=J:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Microsoft Windows Vista
locale en-US
inherit {bootloadersettings}
osdevice partition=J:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {86176074-d569-11dd-8827-fd7183c335b1}
nx OptIn
detecthal YesNow, I tried typing in the following command to change the partition that Vista is supposedly under:
bcdedit.exe /set {default} device partition=e:And the program kindly proceeded to give me this message:An error has occurred setting the element data.
The request is not supported.
I thought it might have been my syntax, so I put quote marks around the partition=e:, tried putting various bits of it in upper case, but no joy. Tried the same stuff with the "osdevice" parameter too, still nothing.
And I can't open a command prompt from my Vista disc - it just starts the installation again from scratch once booted from (tried that too - nothing
).So now that leaves me here, probing the synapses of you all for a solution to this problem. Congratulations on actually being able to read through all of what I've just written. Now, does anyone have any idea how to fix this?
Edit: Yes, winload.exe is there, before any of you smart people say something like that.
Edit2: Tried changing the path to "\Windows\System32\boot\winload.exe". No joy either.
Edit3: Managed to get a Command Prompt window when booting from my Vista disc. Ran bcdedit.exe from there, and it says the device and osdevice are partition E:
Tried changing it to J:, which just resulted in an "unknown" value. Restored the E: values with no success on fixing the problem.
