Vista problem or bad hard drive?

[Varroa]

Ok, I need a little help with this one. I have a dual boot setup (XP/Vista) and everything was working fine. Then the other day I go to boot into Vista and there was nothing! Now before you say it is the latest patch from MS you must read the rest of my post. What I mean by nothing is when I choose Vista in the boot loader the screen goes black and there is not hard drive activity, no cursor, nothing. I tried everything I could think of to fix it (boot from Vista CD and use repair console, spinrite, disk check, etc) but nothing worked. Spinrite came up with a error saying "cannot read from disk, the bios may be blocking full access.....". Oh, in XP I could access the drive and see everything on it and write/erase to the drive. So, I decided to format the Vista drive and start from scratch. I removed all partitions, added new ones and installed Vista again. During the first re-boot during install it came to boot loader and when it started to load Vista THE SAME THING HAPPENED AGAIN . I have tried everything I can think of and no matter what I try Vista will not boot! Is the drive pooched or am I missing something? Thanks in advance.

P.S. the harddrive is a WD 500Gig Sata drive with 16mb cache, about 2 weeks old.

[tzetsin]

if you have a USB hard drive, or thumb drive plugged in while booting causes Vista to fail booting with some hardware configurations

[Varroa]

Originally Posted by tzetsin

if you have a USB hard drive, or thumb drive plugged in while booting causes Vista to fail booting with some hardware configurations

Thanks, I already tried removing everything with no luck including my second monitor, network and any external storage devices.

I have tried checkdisk from xp, I have run all of the WD diagnostic utilities while in XP and they all came up clean. The drive is recognizable from windows xp and I have full access from XP and the bios sees the drive no problem. I even used the XP install disk and ran fixmbr and fixboot to eliminated the vista boot loader before installing vista again (which actually doesn't remove the vista boot loader, just bypasses it because when I re-installed Vista is showed the old Vista in the boot loader and the new one). Spinrite was ran from boot and it is the one that shows problems with the drive that it cannot read. I will try and the WD tools from boot and see if they help.

[tzetsin]

hrm... well, If it comes to the point where you have to try reinstalling vista again, I would suggest deleting the partition, and recreating it before installing. Are you able to boot to safemode with vista? you should be able to get that option in the boot loader screen

[Varroa]

When I re-installed vista I made sure o delete all partions and start from scratch. And no, I cannot boot into safe mode since nothing happens once I choose vista from the boot loader but I can go into the recovery console on the Vista disk and it sees the install and I can access it and it says there are no problems with it.

[sswilson]

Have you tried doing the full partition/re-install at stock speeds?

If you're overclocking, it's possible that your system is slightly unstable and that some form of higher mem issue is plaguing you.

It's a shot in the dark, but guaranteed it's one of the first questions you're going to be asked if you try to RMA the drive or get Vista support.

[tzetsin]

I'm not sure how much more i have to offer, but I would try resetting CMOS, just because you mentioned that spinright error, If that doesnt work, you might try using an old hd (if you've got one kicking around) and install vista on it, or formatting the drive and reinstalling xp, then vista.

[Varroa]

Originally Posted by sswilson

Have you tried doing the full partition/re-install at stock speeds?

If you're overclocking, it's possible that your system is slightly unstable and that some form of higher mem issue is plaguing you.

It's a shot in the dark, but guaranteed it's one of the first questions you're going to be asked if you try to RMA the drive or get Vista support.

Hmm, maybe I should try that, I will give that a go tonight when I am not working. Vista support is out of the question since it is a OEM copy. I will let you know how the full partition/re-format at stock speeds go, thanks.

[Varroa]

I also have a maxtor drive of the same size in my Vantec external case, maybe I should just swap the drives, format and partition the maxtor and then re-install using the maxtor.

[Varroa]

No problems installing Vista on a different drive, I guess the drive is pooched. Time to see if I can RMA it.