missing boot manager

After using all previous builds of Vista on an IDE drive the Beta 2 refused to install on that drive so I added a second SATA drive just for Vista. The install went perfect and I tweaked and tuned it all last night and when I went to boot my system today and hit F11 ( for the nVidia Boot manager) Vista refuses to load. XP worke perfect but the drive Visat is on says no boot loader located. Looked at the drive and unlike previous installs there is no boot files loaded on the drive and I've never seen the Vista boot loader. It was installed from a bootable DVD and not from inside Windows. How do I get my multi boot to work again like it used to ? -- Packman

Yeah, Vista doesn't use BOOT.INI and NTLDR. It uses BOOTMGR. I'm guessing that the nVidia boot manager knows nothing of this new system and looks for NTLDR on the drive where you installed Vista. Of course, there is none, so you get the error message. When Vista installs normally, I'm sure that it writes a MBR directing the BIOS to look to BOOTMGR to continue booting, but it looks as though nVidia's boot manager somehow interfered with this process.
I didn't know that nVidia made a boot manager, but for Vista to work, I think you're going to have to allow Vista to supply the boot manager.
"Packman" wrote in message

After using all previous builds of Vista on an IDE drive the Beta 2 refused to install on that drive so I added a second SATA drive just for Vista. The install went perfect and I tweaked and tuned it all last night and when I went to boot my system today and hit F11 ( for the nVidia Boot manager) Vista refuses to load. XP worke perfect but the drive Visat is on says no boot loader located. Looked at the drive and unlike previous installs there is no boot files loaded on the drive and I've never seen the Vista boot loader. It was installed from a bootable DVD and not from inside Windows. How do I get my multi boot to work again like it used to ? -- Packman

There are a couple of other files installed in the root called boot.bak and bootsect.bak, along with a new folder called, "Boot" that seems to contain all of Vista's Boot Configuration Data. I don't see how a legacy third-party boot manager is going to know to look for Vista's boot information in these new places.
-- Ron
"milleron" wrote in message

Yeah, Vista doesn't use BOOT.INI and NTLDR. It uses BOOTMGR. I'm guessing that the nVidia boot manager knows nothing of this new system and looks for NTLDR on the drive where you installed Vista. Of course, there is none, so you get the error message. When Vista installs normally, I'm sure that it writes a MBR directing the BIOS to look to BOOTMGR to continue booting, but it looks as though nVidia's boot manager somehow interfered with this process.
I didn't know that nVidia made a boot manager, but for Vista to work, I think you're going to have to allow Vista to supply the boot manager.
"Packman" wrote in message After using all previous builds of Vista on an IDE drive the Beta 2 refused to install on that drive so I added a second SATA drive just for Vista. The install went perfect and I tweaked and tuned it all last night and when I went to boot my system today and hit F11 ( for the nVidia Boot manager) Vista refuses to load. XP worke perfect but the drive Visat is on says no boot loader located. Looked at the drive and unlike previous installs there is no boot files loaded on the drive and I've never seen the Vista boot loader. It was installed from a bootable DVD and not from inside Windows. How do I get my multi boot to work again like it used to ? -- Packman