Today I received a lot of goodies in the mail. A brand new MSI motherboard, AMD Dual Core 3800+ Processor, 250GB SATA Hard Drive, 2GB DDR ram, 256 nVidia 7600 GT graphics card, and a bunch of other stuff. It was time to build a good performing system to replace my old system I built in 2001.

Tonight I did a fresh install of the Windows Vista Business Operating System on the primary 250GB Maxtor Hard Drive. Everything was running smoothly until I encountered another problem with Windows Vista. After shutting down the computer to install my old 160GB PATA Hard Drive (transfer files), Windows Vista would no longer boot. Instead I am left with a nice “Non-system disk or disk error” message. Now you may be asking if I had set the jumper settings correctly, or the boot sequence in BIOS…well of course!

I then figured it would be best to return to the original way I had everything set up, so I removed the old Hard Drive…no luck. So what to do next? I threw in the Windows Vista install CD and selected the “repair” feature after booting off of the CD. The repair feature instantly recognized that the master boot record was damaged, and it fixed the problem accordingly. After a fresh restart, Windows Vista booted fine.

Now I still needed to get my old Application Data files off of the old hard drive, so I reconnected the hard drive to the motherboard and yet again, “Non-system disk or disk error” JUST GREAT! Yet again, I had to throw in the Vista install CD to repair the master boot record, and now my computer boots fine with both hard drives connected.

I have never experienced a problem like this when i was running Windows XP, or the earlier versions of Windows, as I have moved hard drives around in the past. So in conclusion, if you ever need to throw in another hard drive while you are running Windows Vista, you might experience a problem similar to this. Just giving you a heads up.