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| Thread ID: 100969 | 2009-06-27 06:22:00 | Near disaster with W7 installation attempt | somebody (208) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 786304 | 2009-06-27 06:22:00 | I decided to try installing W7 onto a VHD, and booting to it. My PC was running Vista Business edition at the time. I followed these instructions: www.sevenforums.com All seemed to go well, up until the installer said it needed to reboot my PC. When it did, I noticed that my PC automatically booted into the install DVD again. A closer look in the BIOS showed that my hard drive was no longer a bootable option. I should note here that I have a RAID setup, with "C:" drive being a RAID0 stripe across 4 disks, and "D:" drive being a RAID10 across 4 disks (stripe & mirror). In a nutshell, it seemed the boot loader/sector was stuffed. I decided I'd try to be smart and use the W7 bootrec tool to fix my boot loader, but that seemed to make matters worse - when I rebooted, I noticed the RAID BIOS was reporting the status of the "D" partition as "Initialising", which I had never seen before. I then booted to a Vista DVD and used the repair tool to fix the bootloader. Fortunately that worked, and I can now boot into Vista - and everything still seems to work. However, the status of D drive is still reported as "Initialising" (see screenshot: imagef1.net.nz). The good news is that all of my files on D: still seem to be intact. Does anyone have any idea what might have triggered the RAID manager to decide that the second raid volume ("D" drive) needed to be verified and/or repaired? [Note: This serves me right for playing around on my production system] |
somebody (208) | ||
| 786305 | 2009-06-27 07:00:00 | This is only a guess, but I had something similar when trying a VHD on this Vista PC (also my main one) - I suspect it had something to do with step 4 using diskpart. In my case it did screw Vista, and the repair didn't work. Lucky I have this PC Do complete Daily backups to WHS - so I had to run the last back up to get it going again. I ended up installing a second drive and loading W7 into that - now it boots fine in either W7 or Vista. |
wainuitech (129) | ||
| 786306 | 2009-06-27 07:40:00 | Interesting...to me it seems like a fail proof method, and has never failed me. My steps for this are also a bit more simple, listed on my blog.. Once you mount the VHD and install anything on it, it shouldn't touch anything outside it, definetly not the bootloader. Maybe it is this RAID array confusing it.. Blam |
Blam (54) | ||
| 786307 | 2009-06-27 07:40:00 | Interesting...to me it seems like a fail proof method, and has never failed me. My steps for this are also a bit more simple, listed on my blog.. Blam I'll have a look and give it another go. |
somebody (208) | ||
| 786308 | 2009-06-27 07:41:00 | Ok, make an image of Vista first, fi you can.. | Blam (54) | ||
| 786309 | 2009-06-27 07:56:00 | Ok, make an image of Vista first, fi you can.. Yup - I have a full image backup of my C: drive from 6pm last night, and a full copy of my D: drive on a network drive. Incidentally, I've just repeated the exact same procedures I followed earlier, and it appears to be working just fine (in the final stages of installation). |
somebody (208) | ||
| 786310 | 2009-06-27 08:02:00 | Wicked. Nice RAID array BTW! If only I could afford something like that.... |
Blam (54) | ||
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