Vista - Trying to reinstall Vista/XP dual boot

I recently bought I new Seagate 500GB hard drive with plans to rebuild my PC from scratch as both the partition with Vista the other partition with XP was slowing down. The original hard drive was a Seagate 320GB that was partitioned for the two above OS's. After saving all my personal files on a portable hard drive, I booted up the computer with the Vista CD and reformatted the drive as my way of deleting everything and starting from scratch. After I did this, I connected the 500GB hard drive and began a journey of a lot of frustatrion and wasted time. Let me say it right here that it isn't a faulty new hard drive. It has something to do with a section of computer skills that surpasses my knowledge.

Let me post my system first though:

Motherboard: MSI K9N SLI Platinum
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400 3.2 GHz
Ram: OCZ Reaper HPC DDR2 8GB
GPU: 2x GeForce 8800GTS SLI
HD: Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200RPM
Seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200RPM

Okay, starting with two hard drives, virtually one clean as new, I plan to install Vista Premium 64bit to the 500GB HD and XP Home 32bit to the 320GB HD. I proceed to install Vista first and everything works fine until I install XP. Now, a blue screen pops up at every bootup as soon as it starts to read the hard drives (and it doesn't matter what order I set them up to boot in BIOS). Oddly enough, if I physically disconnect the Vista drive by unplugging the cable, XP boots up fine. Doing it the other way around (disconnecting the XP drive), though, doesn't allow Vista to work.

Researching on another computer, I found out that Vista has a built in boot program that allows the detection of multiple OS's. Installing XP after Vista must of overwrote this program. So Vista was basically corrupted and if given the chance, would also corrupt XP. I said to myself, "No problem, just an easy fix of starting over again through more reformatting and making sure to install XP first this time." But wouldn't you know, it still was giving me the blue screen. Sometimes not all the time, I would try to boot up from either of the OS disks, supposedly not even touching the hard drives and I'd get a blue screen.

Up to this point, I have tried different compinations of formatting processes, such as formatting the XP drive with the XP disk, then installing it. Then booting up Vista's disk and formatting the Vista drive then installing Vista. I've tried formatting both drives with the XP disk and then again with the Vista disk. I've tried formatting XP drive with the Vista disk, shuting down, then booting up with XP disk to install XP. If you can think of a combination/order to doing this, I've probably already done it. Out of exasperation, I gave up for about two weeks and the computer is currently sitting upstairs not functioning or giving any sign of ever functioning again with the current hard drives. I mean, how bad does the problem have to be to get a blue screen when I boot up with a operating system's CD.

So now, before I take it to a technician, can anyone manage to help me fix my hard drives, despite one of the most permanent types of resetting and deleting (reformatting) not working?

BTW don't ask what the blue screen said. It disappears to quick even for a camera, and I'm sure based on seeing it before with other problems that it is just advising me on solutions that won't work. It's that blue screen that sometimes has that "crash memory dump" or something like that at the bottom.

Thanks in advance

I know how to fix this......go to BIOS and under system configuration, disable SATA Native Support. That should fix it. I had the same problem once and I somehow figured this out and fixed it.


Hope it helped

I haven't tried it yet, but I wanted to reply right away. I'm always trying to learn more about computers; is there anything that this solution will affect. I can't find much on what it does, at least not in layman's terms. Basically, is there any changes I can expect to see besides the obvious fact that my problem is solved.

Thanks

Nope it won't affect anything and there would be no changes you would feel. I'm happy to help. Reply if your problem has been solved.

Welcome, da8472

I just went to go look for the option to SATA Native Support and couldn't find it. I called MSI tech support and asked them about it. I have a feeling he didn't know enough to help because all he said was to go into the Standard CMOS Features where I can select any of my drives and play with the following:

LBA/Large Mode
DMA Mode
Hard Drive S.M.A.R.T.

I doubt any of these are related to SATA native support and based on what you said (system configuration), modifying an individual hard drive is way off from what I need to do. Looking online some more there are other people who can't find this feature on their BIOS, but none with the same motherboard as me, so they were no help.

Could this option be disquised with different words? Or perhaps there is a program I can boot on a floppy disk to get the job done.

Great fix. Since you're looking to learn more, here's a good resource for multi-booting your PC

Install more than one operating system (multiboot) - Windows Vista Help

Cheers