Hello,

First time I start a thread on the LFS forums, yay me

So, here's the problem. I've got two hard drives installed on my computer. On one I've got Windows XP installed, on the other Vista Ultimate. I've been using Windows Vista for a little over a year now and am very happy with it, despite what anyone might say about it. I haven't had a single complaint.

Anyway, today I wanted to boot up the computer and I get a message saying "Error loading OS". I unplugged the drive with Vista on it, tried again and it boots XP fine. I then unplugged the XP drive and plugged the Vista drive back in, and I get the same error message. So the problem lies with that drive.

Now... what could be the problem and how do I go about diagnosing and possibly (hopefully) fixing it? Yesterday I just shut down my computer the usual way and nothing has happened to it since, so I'm stumped as to what might have caused this.

I'm glad now that I installed the two OS's on two different drives so that I at least can still use XP for the time being, but I definitely prefer Vista. The fact that I haven't used XP in more than a year also means that everything on this drive is outdated; media players, codecs, browsers, chat clients, my LFS folder (setups, scripts, skins, settings,...). So I'm fairly annoyed

Any help or ideas would be most appreciated.

Thanks!

I dont think this would have anything to do with it but, do you have 2 ribbons or 1? If you have 2 try using the one you plug into the XP and see if the one you plug into the vista is going bad. I don't know anything about those but im just taking a guess, I dont know if those can go bad or not.

Do you mean the cables? Well, one drive (the one with XP on it) is SATA whilst the other is plain old IDE, so they both use a different cable

Thanks for the suggestion, though. I wish it were that easy!

Boot your Vista DVD and let it try to repair the startup.

Hmm, that might be a good idea. I'd have done that already if I had the damn thing. I haven't unpacked all that stuff since I moved last year, due to lack of space

Well, I guess I gotta go open up some boxes and look for it.

I'll keep you posted. Thanks.

It could be that the part of the HDD that the OS is on has just randomly Failed. A similar thing happened to me, a part of the HDD went dodgy (without any signs of it beforehand) and the computer wouldn't run properly. It might have been due to a seriously massive folder (20GB) at the location of the problem but I doubt it

We managed to recover all the Data except for the bit on the broken part.

Well, this is weird After having gone through a number of boxes I found my Vista DVD. So I plug in the drive again, boot up the computer keeping the DVD at the ready, and... Vista boots without problems

Anyway, I'm glad it's working again! I'm gonna copy my LFS folder to the other drive just to be safe

Thanks for the suggestions everyone!

Quote from obsolum :

Well, this is weird After having gone through a number of boxes I found my Vista DVD. So I plug in the drive again, boot up the computer keeping the DVD at the ready, and... Vista boots without problems

Anyway, I'm glad it's working again! I'm gonna copy my LFS folder to the other drive just to be safe

Thanks for the suggestions everyone!

Most likely a dodgy connection in that case. These things can work loose over time or maybe get a bit corroded. Pluging/unplugging them a few times can sometimes clean the connectors and restore the connection.