huge problem. have 2hdds one has win 7 other has vista. formated win 7 now vista wont boot no operating system found

hey i have a huge problem and would be might grateful if someone could help.
i have a gatway fx with 2 hdds in it. one has windows 7 and the other has vista. i formatted the windows 7 and now vista wont boot and says no operating system found. i used linux and all my data is still there for windows vista. how do i repair the mbr on it. i tried using the vista dvd and doing repair but it doesn't detect the installation.

 

Check in the BIOS to see which hard drive is set to be read first in the boot sequence order - if it's not the disk with .Vista installed, try switching the hard drives in the boot sequence to see if that helps.

 

Shyster1 is spot on.

A less likely scenario is physical jumpers on the hard drives themselves but those are becoming more rare with newer SATA drives.

Only one drive can be designated as the "boot" or "active" drive. When you installed Windows 7 it probably designated the drive you installed it on as the "boot" drive. When you set it for dual boot, it gave you a menu option to boot to Vista, but you formatted the drive and probably the dual boot menu along with it.

You may also be able to use a linux install disk to boot to the Vista drive, as Linux has a boot menu as well.

Oh it also may be possible depending on your motherboard that the boot drive is determined by which sata channel you have it plugged into i/e sata channel 0 / 1 / 2

 

Hi predatorramboxxx is the partition set vista partition set to active? If not try setting it with the diskpart command in the vista dvd command prompt. After that shut down and get back into the vista dvd. Get on to the page where it says "select your operating system". It should say something about recovering the bcd entries. press ok and and your computer should restart and boot into vista!

 

I had this exact same problem.

The vista installation isn't recognised because the partition isn't active.

I used gparted to set it to active, then I used my OEM vista disk, and used the startup repair to rewrite the vista mbr.

 

A follow up to my answer: Only doing the first step could work. The second step is sometimes needed though. if this doesn't work read up on the fixboot and fixmbr commands. Also I have done this before with my computer and it worked perfectly! This error is almost always software related although usb drives can sometimes cause this in older computers.

 

I am 99% sure the error the OP is experiencing is because he formattred the 7 partition. This has then deleted the MBR, which means when the computer turns on, it sees nothing to load.

 

can't you just insert the vista disc and go into the repair option then do fixboot or fixmbr?

 

Probably not as the disc can't see the vista installation. Thats why, when i had this problem, I had to use Gparted to make the partition active.

 

oh sorry, didn't read the whole post

 

You do know you can still use the command line without selecting the operating system in the vista dvd, right ? I've had the exact same problem and used the vista dvd for all my needs. That way you don't have to learn all those big bad and oh so complicated linux commands .

 

hes right! i should have thought of that. i got to bored so i just backed everything up and then did a clean install