"Disk boot failure, Insert system disk and press enter" Please Help...

[nmhsjunk]

I have one hard drive, 160 gb Seagate, with 2 partitions. On my first partition, I had XP pro installed, then in my second partition, which was about 20 gigs in capacity, I installed Vista. Vista installed fine, and I got on it with no probs. However, I went back and tried to boot off my XP partition. This is when i get the error, "Disk boot failure, Insert system disk and press enter" in CAPS in dos when I start up that partition. I would be happy and just stay on Vista, if it wasn't for two small problems: Everything from my XP partition is still intact(as it should be), and I COULD access them from Vista, but its a pain in the ass to, with all the permission problems. I've tried to replace ownership to my Vista account on practically my whole XP partition, but it hasn't really got the job done. Another problem, is that my DVD drive isnt being picked up by Vista, and drivers wouldn't be too usefull because the the drive isnt even being picked up physically by Vista. (I didn't install Vista thru a CD/DVD, but rather thru an image on my computer). But those are problems for another day...

So if anyone could get me back on XP, I'd appreciate it. I believe the problem lays in a corrupt MBR. I'll get back to the computer on Monday, and with my XP CD, I'll try to access it thru DOS, if it doesn't say that the partition is too corrupt for me to even do that. Thanks!!

PS. I'm not exactly new to computers, and I've seen many problems over the years, so don't hesitate to throw technical terms at me....Sorry it was such a long post, I hate those myself! But Thanks again!!

[8Balla]

nmhsjunk, I've the same problem with a P3 I just built.Maybe we can help each other. I created a system floppy disk by adding the ntdetect, ntldr, & boot.ini files. I got all the way to the boot.ini being bad. You can try this as I'm still working on it myself.

[Statica]

Hi nmhsjunk:
Firstly, I wouldn't be giving Vista access to the XP drives, it's done so by design just so that XP's system files dont get tampered with by the newer OS.
Now regarding your diskboot failure that you're getting. I'm assuming that you're using Vista's boot loader to get to XP.
What you will need to do is paste the contents of your bcdedit configuration data. There are a couple of ways to do it .. one is to use the native bcdedit.exe found in \Windows\system32 on Vista or you can download a GUI tool like EasyBCD from: http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

If you're using EasyBCD .. just load it up and look up the entries for your Legacy OS. It should read something like:

Name: Earlier Version of Windows BCD ID: {ntldr} Drive: D:\ Bootloader Path: \ntldr

Make sure that the entries are correct.