strange boot problem

[palladia]

I am running Vista Ultimate x64, and have a nVidia 8800GTS video card. I recently tried to upgrade video driver from nVidia, and that's when the problem started...

After the "upgrade", I could not boot windows. I tried Windows Restore to roll back the changes. That didn't work. I tried uninstalling the video driver, and reinstall an earlier driver, that didn't work either. Even without nVidia video drivers, I could not boot. Booting into safe mode is no problem, but normal boot always fails at the same spot (progress bar at center of graph, on first pass).

Now this is where it gets strange. I booted up from Vista CD, and selected repairs. I have two hard drives. First, the primary drive, is actually a RAID 0 set using two WD 250G drives, connected via a 3Ware RAID controller. The second drive, a standalone WD drive, holds only data. When I booted up Vista CD, it asked me for disk drivers, since it doesn't see a valid drive with OS on it. Since I couldn't find my 3Ware RAID driver, I skipped it, and asked it to repair my configuration anyway. It completed the repair (!!!) in seconds, and after reboot, everything came up perfectly! Problem is, if I reboot again, computer is back to where it started - can't boot again. I looked at the details of the Vista repair log, and since it couldn't find the OS, it assumed my data drive were the primary drive, and supposedly repaired the primary partition on that drive.

So the question is, why would fixing my data drive cause my system to boot correctly once, but only once? Since I haven't been able to find the proper 3Ware drivers, I haven't been able to really fix the OS partition, or reinstall. Any clue what's going on? I have run chkdsk on the primary drive, and it showed no problems.

[PuPu]

I am running Vista Ultimate x64, and have a nVidia 8800GTS video card. I recently tried to upgrade video driver from nVidia, and that's when the problem started...

After the "upgrade", I could not boot windows. I tried Windows Restore to roll back the changes. That didn't work. I tried uninstalling the video driver, and reinstall an earlier driver, that didn't work either. Even without nVidia video drivers, I could not boot. Booting into safe mode is no problem, but normal boot always fails at the same spot (progress bar at center of graph, on first pass).

Now this is where it gets strange. I booted up from Vista CD, and selected repairs. I have two hard drives. First, the primary drive, is actually a RAID 0 set using two WD 250G drives, connected via a 3Ware RAID controller. The second drive, a standalone WD drive, holds only data. When I booted up Vista CD, it asked me for disk drivers, since it doesn't see a valid drive with OS on it. Since I couldn't find my 3Ware RAID driver, I skipped it, and asked it to repair my configuration anyway. It completed the repair (!!!) in seconds, and after reboot, everything came up perfectly! Problem is, if I reboot again, computer is back to where it started - can't boot again. I looked at the details of the Vista repair log, and since it couldn't find the OS, it assumed my data drive were the primary drive, and supposedly repaired the primary partition on that drive.

So the question is, why would fixing my data drive cause my system to boot correctly once, but only once? Since I haven't been able to find the proper 3Ware drivers, I haven't been able to really fix the OS partition, or reinstall. Any clue what's going on? I have run chkdsk on the primary drive, and it showed no problems.

I got basicly same problem and basicly same way started the problem, i have Vista X64 and 8800GTS too but without Raid things just one SATA drive. Dont think its related to that anyway. So i think its some Vista bug i first thought my hard drive is broken...

Btw if you solve your problem, post it here...

Seems to me same problem we are having http://www.msfn.org/board/KB941649_problems_t105515.html

Edited October 19, 2007 by PuPu