Hi,

I'm having some trouble with booting into vista(home premium) after my brother messed around with it.

The computer has one disk with two partitions. 1st partition was vista, the 2nd was empty.
I don't know what happened, but the vista partition kind of switched with the empty one.
so at the startup i get a 'no system disk' error. The empty partition is drive C and the vista partition is drive D

When I boot from the vista dvd and go to the recovery, it appears that there is a vista installation on drive D: but I can't boot into it. I tried the boot recovery but didn't work. system restore is not possible.

What can I do to fix this, to be able to boot into vista again.

Thanks,

Hello megabyte7, welcome to PCHF.

Without really knowing exactly what happened, it's absolutely impossible to say, and any solutions I give you at this point will most likely make things worse, unless you can give at least some hint of what applications he was using, possible Disk Management or something like that, or maybe some software such as Acronis Drive Image? I do know that it's not possible to physically move your Vista installation from one partition to another whilst it's being used. My initial thought was that maybe he had just changed the drive letters around, but this does not explain the 'no system disk' or 'non system disk' error. Slap him around a bit and find out what he did? lol

--
What may help also, is from the recovery console. Type in diskpart, and from the diskpart prompt, type in list volume, and post back what you see here.

thanks for the reply,

After I did the list volume;
volume 0 D (no label name)
volume 1 C (this one does have a label name)
etc

Both are OK

so what's next

Hey mega, can you give me the full text including the label names. And if you can get any further information from your brother about what software he was using (as mentioned earlier - merged post just incase you missed the post earlier), would help greatly too.

My brother had some stuff on the 'empty' partition wich he formatted and made it active or something like that with the vista disk utility.....

so that should be the cause

list volume:
Volume 0 ... D...................NTFS........partition......144 GB ......OK
Volume 1 ... C... DATA ...FAT32.......partition......144 GB ......OK

Volume 2.....H.................. removab.
etc (usb & dvd drives)

ahhh, thanks very much megabyte, that does explain things very well.

OK, here we go! I'm assuming/hoping that the partition that he formatting is now empty?

If so, in order to get your PC up and running, we need to match the filesystem of volume 1 with volume 0 (convert it from FAT32 to NTFS). In order to do this, here are a list of commands to follow using the recovery console:

FORMAT C: /FS:NTFS < you can see why we needed to be clear
COPY D:\NTLDR C:\
COPY D:\NTDETECT.COM C:\
COPY D:\BOOT.INI C:\
FIXBOOT

Restart your PC, and then go back to Disk Management. Right click on your C Drive and make it Active again. The PC will boot to the first available active partition, so this part is equally as important, otherwise when it comes to formatting that partition again, you won't be able to boot.

Let me know if you get stuck at any point.