AlienGamerLT

First off, thanks in advance for the help:

Just installed a WD150 Raptor a couple weeks ago and had it running as a secondary drive. The primary drive is an IDE Maxtor 300GB and the second is a SATA Raptor WD150. I have xp pro installed on the IDE Maxtor drive and am trying to install Vista to the WD SATA drive...

I run the install (in or out of windows hasn't mattered), it installs the OS to the Raptor drive (which is recognized as a raptor during the installation) but on the reboot to go into Vista for the first time, the PC just hangs on a black screen... It's before it ever boots to the drive because if I hit alt+ctrl+del it instantly restarts. Only thing I can do is wait till the dual boot option comes up and go into XP on the IDE drive... If I try to go into the new Vista install on the Raptor SATA drive it just hangs. I've even let it sit overnight during the hang to see if it just needed some time; people seem to say it takes a long time to get past that first boot... but 7 hours?

Any idea why? I've updated my bios and chipset drivers for vista, all hardware is vista compliant and ready.

My only guess is that the Raptor was not setup as a bootable hard drive when I first installed it, so it won't boot up. My option being, to do a full system wipe on both drives, install the raptor drive as a bootable with the downloaded diagnostic off the WD site, and then install vista on the raptor as the primary OS.

Any suggestions?

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AlienGamerLT - Currently Playing: Company of Heroes:OF, Fury, Hellgate:London, BF:2142/2, TeamFortress 2, QuakeWars:ET, Oblivion & All Exp's, and Supreme Commander. Message me on XFire if you want to play (AlienGamerLT / RSXMidnight03).

DiagnosisDirt

The boot loader your using is it XP's or is it Vista's ?
Try to use a 3rd party boot loader.
like , GAG (http://gag.sourceforge.net/) ,
or VistaBootPro (http://www.vistabootpro.org/)

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Murlocke

When dual booting vista automatically takes over and becomes the new and default OS.

I installed XP then vista 3 times so far, (Boot to XP disk, install. Then shut down and boot to vista disc, install on a diff hard drive/partition.)

And I get the option to go to "Vista" or "Older version of windows" each time during boot.

My guess is somehow the vista installation got corrupted, trying cleaning the disk and formating the raptor and try again.

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AlienGamerLT

I get the option to load to Vista... but when it's selected it just doesn't go anywhere ("Black" / "Blank" Screen of Death).

Not sure what good the bookloader would be... Vista defaults to showing me boot options after I've installed... my hard drive just isn't kicking over and booting into Vista (it hangs on the restart).


Murlocke - looking in your hard drive faq though, it seems I may be right on my first guess. I originally formatted the hard drive from windows, so it wasn't formatted as a bootable drive. I'll try formatting again, this time from DOS.

We'll see if that works but if anyone has any other suggestions; much appreciated.

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AlienGamerLT - Currently Playing: Company of Heroes:OF, Fury, Hellgate:London, BF:2142/2, TeamFortress 2, QuakeWars:ET, Oblivion & All Exp's, and Supreme Commander. Message me on XFire if you want to play (AlienGamerLT / RSXMidnight03).