Boot up uses the registry from a different drive on a dual boot system

[wither 3]

I have a dual boot system using two hard drives, both with Vista SP2 and up to date.

Last week I was having a slowdown problem on the drive I use as my primary. I did all kinds of testing to try to determine the cause but came up empty handed. All the while, I was running SFC repeatedly because it kept finding corrupt files. I shut down last night and when I rebooted this morning, the desktop itself is the one from the other secondary hard drive while the task bar is the correct one. However, programs I normally run that are in the taskbar and desktop that aren't on the secondary drive, won't run any more. After checking, I find that Vista is using the registry from the secondary drive while the contents of all my partitions (3) on the primary are correct.

I had an image stored on the secondary drive but I can't run it because Windows Explorer doesn't see the C: on that drive. It does see the other two partitions on that drive.

In addition, the secondary drive will no longer boot and asks me to do a repair.

Trouble is, if I run a repair on the secondary drive, what's that going to do in regards to booting from the primary drive since the latter is using the registry from the secondary drive?

Anybody got any ideas besides wiping both and reinstalling Vista?

 

[wither 3]

Well, I discovered that my primary hard drive is reading the registry directly from the secondary drive during boot up. Not sure how it does that since Windows Explorer can't see the C: drive on the secondary drive. How I know is, I unplugged the secondary hard drive and tried to boot to the primary drive. No dice.

So the dilemma is, do I try to repair the primary drive with or without the secondary plugged in? I have a recovery disc provided with my system 11 years ago which, of course, probably doesn't have even SP1. I also have SP1 and SP2 discs I purchased from Microsoft but they're about 5 years old so, they wouldn't have all the updates. If I try to repair the secondary drive, is that going to disable my ability to boot to the primary drive?

 

[wither 3]

I gave up yesterday and tried to reinstall Vista. It goes through the process and when it reboots, it gives me a BSOD with the 0x7E bug code with the C......5 first parameter but doesn't give any additional information. Apparently, there's a problem with a driver of some sort. Tried again today with the secondary drive and the same thing happens. Bought another hard drive with nothing on it. Same problem. The only external thing listed in the BIOS is the NVIDIA Network files. Can't get rid of those from the BIOS.

It won't let me get to safe mode to look at the .dmp files.

I guess none of the old standbys here are willing to help.

 

[wither 3]

What it looks like is that I'm either going to have to load the NVIDIA driver during the Windows installation or flash the BIOS to get rid of the NVIDIA reference in it. I'll need some advice from some of the experts out there. Since no one is responding here, I might post in the Win 7 forum.

 

[townsbg]

Sorry but I have no idea.

 

[wither 3]

Thanks for replying. Where's the other guys? I think I'll post in the Win 7 forum since this problem isn't really OS specific.

I don't know if flashing the BIOS will get rid of the NVIDIA nework controller which is in the network boot priority. I think that's what's causing the problem. The most common error is the 0x7E but I occasionally get a 0xA or 0xD1. Strange thing is that, one time, it actually booted into Vista and I could make settings, etc. But, when I rebooted it through up the 0X7E. I don't know if getting the full installation disc here would help.

 

[wither 3]

I managed to install Vista using the ISO provided by ex_brit on a new hard drive. I reinstalled the graphics card driver before attempting to reboot after the installation since the BIOS has the NVIDIA Boot Agent. I don't know if that helped or not but, at least the drive will boot. However, the other two drives it replaced still won't boot. I'm going to try some things tomorrow to fix those.

 

[wither 3]

Just to update, I reinstalled Vista on one of the other two drives. It was my original secondary drive. When I get time, I'm going to try some things on the old primary drive to get it to boot.

 

[townsbg]

Do yo need 2 installs of vista? My Vista VM is funky so I did an SFC and that broke the longhorn theme I had installed, AeroVG, which I really love. Now Vista Glazz is telling me that there are still corrupt files so I can't get my theme back.

 

[wither 3]

Hi townsbg- Good to see you. I haven't seen Rich46 lately in any of the forums. I hope he's okay.

I did that on purpose in the event that I lost a drive. In addition, I have some software with various versions which don't play well together. I separated the ones that don't play well together this way. Kind of ironic that whatever caused my boot problem disabled booting both drives.

 

[townsbg]

Yeah I haven't seen him on 7. Hardly anyone comes here anymore.

 

[wither 3]

I had posted in another thread in this forum where the person had the exact problem as mine and he helped but didn't get a response. Also, looked in the Win 7 and Ten forum.