Fixing the Vista Boot Loader

[kram 2.0]

Hi Folks,

I'm having a bit of a dilemma. My desktop carriers two Seagate hard drives. My 80GB HDD has Windows XP, fully functional, and at around 75% full. So I bought a 320 GB Seagate HDD, loaded it with Vista, and tuned everything and installed all apps needed. It dual-booted with my 80GB WinXP HDD. Then, the 320 GB Vista HDD started chirping. I rested the hard drive and had it run long enough continuously for me to image it. I used DriveImage XML, and placed backup images on my external HDD.

I sent the HDD back to Seagate, got an RMA, and received a 500GB HDD in return. It was my second time with a faulty hard drive, so they bumped me up to 500GB. I mounted the image back onto the hard drive as instructed on DriveImage XML. HDD not found. I ran the Vista repair function through the Vista Disk - it "detected a problem" and "fixed" it. Now, I'm getting "Access Denied" to explore.exe. Window-less Vista is rather unamusing. So while I get the standard GUI, I do not get the windows taskbar, the icons, etc.

Now, I'm prepared to re-install everything on the HDD, either from the external hard drive image that I still have, or from scratch (ie. load OS, load drivers, etc.). The one thing that worries me, though, is that Vista re-wrote my 80GB WinXP bootloader so that it must search for the "Vista Enterprise" partition first. If I were to re-install everything, then I will need to deal with the bootloader that's written on my 80GB HDD.

So my question is, is there an easy way to image my Vista image onto this 500GB HDD with all permissions set correctly? If not, how will I deal with the bootloader when I reinstall everything? I suppose Vista might take care of that, but I'd rather not take this path if possible.

Thanks in advanced for your valuable time,
kram