EggXpert

Boy, it's been ages since I've posted on Eggxpert! I'll try to make this as thorough as I can.

Several days ago I had
- 1x 160 GB HDD with XP
- 1x 250 GB HDD with Vista on 1 partition and Windows 7 Beta on 2nd partition

I wiped the 250GB disk and reformatted, then installed Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. I kept XP on the smaller disk so I could still dual boot. I started setting things up in Windows 7 and noticed that my 750GB E-sata external drive was not being recognized, did some googling, and found I needed to install the Jmicron sata controller for my motherboard. I had already restarted several times at this point after installing Windows 7 and installing the necessary drivers for it.
On the boot manager where you can pick which OS to boot to I noticed that Windows 7 was listed twice but put off fixing it until later. The first listing would put into W7 and the second would not. It gave me some sort of error although I'm not sure what it was. When I got around to googling that issue I followed these steps

The easiest way to remove an entry in the Windows 7 Boot Configuration is to use msconfig. 

To launch msconfig:

1.  Click Start
2.  In the Search text box, type msconfig
3.  Launch msconfig by selecting it from the search results above the search text box.

After msconfig is launched:

1.  Go to the Boot tab
2.  Slect the boot entry you want to delete.
3.  Click the Delete button and then click OK.

Make sure to be logged in to the Windows 7 partition you want to keep when performing these steps so you don't delete the good installation by mistake.

The steps seemed to work OK and the second entry for Windows 7 disappeared. I worked and played on my computer in Windows 7 for several hours then needed to boot back into Windows XP to work with some programs I hadn't installed on W7 yet. When my computer got past the initial motherboard logo screen it gave me the black screen that is labeled with the Nvidia title and says "Detecting Array.."
It will sit there for about 5-10 mins and eventually it got to the boot menu and I selected XP. The same thing happened when I restarted and went into BIOS to see if anything looked fishy.
After I got out of the BIOS I tried booting up XP again and it gave me "Disk Boot Failure, Insert Sytem disk and press enter" I inserted my windows 7 installation CD thinking that it may correct but my system rejected that and just repeated the message.
As it is currently I can get into the BIOS after the 10 minute wait at "detecting array" but I cannot get to the boot menu.

My internal HDDs are listed in the BIOS still so I suppose they aren't completely dead. 

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance and sorry for the long post.

Ugh I dont know!! Maybe becuse you choose XP and then used Win 7 installation disk when Win 7 was on another HDD, Master Boot Record got messed up somehow? I am not 100% sure but I think when you have two HDDs, each of them has MBR. Can you try sticking the 7 installation disk, boot FROM THE DISK (by setting your CD/DVD drive as the first boot device), chose "repair" --> Windows start up error. Then reboot to see if that fixes the problem??  I think the only way to shake things and get something going from here is to boot from a disk. 

 Also, you can removed the XP drive once, and fix Win7 boot first and then add back the XP drive, just to make it simple. If XP doesn't boot after that, you could try using XP disk to fix XP's boot error.

 

My computer is being very inconsistent. I just got home from work and decided to try once more to at least get to either operating system. It still hangs at the "Detecting array" for about 15 minutes. This time I had inserted the XP install disk instead of the Windows 7 to see if it would work, walked away from the computer for a minute and missed my opportunity to repair it, However, it did boot into Windows 7 which is what I am still currently on. How can I go about checking to make sure the MBR is ok from here?

Ohhh okay, then MBR is fine, at least for Windows 7!!  I would try booting into XP and see if it works. If it doesn't, then repare XP's MBR with the XP disk. Like I said, I am not sure if MBR is on both drives separately OR just one of them. When I have a dual boot system on the same drive, there's only one MBR system partition, only with one of the two OSs. But you may or may not have another one for the XP drive. What does BIOS say? Did you see both OSs listed there? From what you said, I am not sure if it booted into Windows 7 because that's the first one on the list (if you don't choose one or the other in however many seconds, it automatically boot into the first one) OR because Windows 7 was the only OS that the system recognized or could boot into.

You can't run a single drive on the JMicron controller, it is RAID only.

MBR is on the main boot drive only, when you install the win7 os it replaces the XP MBR, if you formated the hard drive YOU ERASED THE XP PORTION OF IT!!!!!.

You'll need to repair the XP with the disk, the probably have to reinstall win7 to get it right. (format win7 drive -- repair XP ---- install win7 again)

(if you wanna get advanced on it, go to the repair console on the XP disk and type fixmbr and try your luck)

 

How do you know this person has the JMcron controller?  I believe you but am just impressed by your psychic ability! LOL!

Then how come they had all 3 running on separate drives for a couple of days before they formated the drive that Win 7 drive? I mean if it's RAID only but the two drives actually ran like one big drive?  Computers are so weird. ....

GmsCool:

You can't run a single drive on the JMicron controller, it is RAID only.

MBR is on the main boot drive only, when you install the win7 os it replaces the XP MBR, if you formated the hard drive YOU ERASED THE XP PORTION OF IT!!!!!.

You'll need to repair the XP with the disk, the probably have to reinstall win7 to get it right. (format win7 drive -- repair XP ---- install win7 again)

(if you wanna get advanced on it, go to the repair console on the XP disk and type fixmbr and try your luck)

OK I've been experimenting around a lot and researching various things. Since I last posted I've

- Booted with the XP installation disk and run the repair console, CHKDSK. I also saw the FIXMBR function but avoided it when it said it had the potential to wipe my drives. So I figured I'd hold out on that until later.

-Checked physical connections, ran each memory stick individually, removed all unnecessary connections (USB, etc)

- I reset all BIOS settings to default, including my overclock. This seems to have fixed the "Disk Boot Failure" message. I'm going to keep experimenting with it though to make sure that's really the problem.

- You're definitely right about the Jmicron controller, through trial-and-error it seems the computer will only give me the "Detecting Array" message when I have the E-SATA drive plugged in at boot.

If I am still able to access both operating systems do I still need to attempt to repair the MBR or does just accessing them mean that the MBR is fine? 

products:

How do you know this person has the JMcron controller?

I stated it in my first post. 

So your able to get into XP now? If you can boot into all of the installed OS's then the MBR is probably fine.