Help! Cant Boot At All!!

Long story short, yesterday I decided to dual boot Windows Xp MCE on a seperate partition with My existing copy of Vista Premium. I shrank my primary partition and installed XP on the new partition, but when it restarted to finish installing i got an error. I could then, no longer boot into vista or XP.

SO, i went to the store and picked up a new sataII seagate barracuda 320 to install one of the OS's on so that I could start over and just dual boot on 2 seperate drives. I installed XP on it, it went pretty smooth, I booted it up and copied some old files from my vista install to the new HHD so i could reinstall vista.

I rebooted with the vista CD in, reformatted the old HDD, started installing vista until...it restarted (as it does during the installation process) and....guess what? nothing...blank screen. So i went back and tried installing vista again with the same results. I tried changing BIOS settings and what not, manually "booting from HDD X" but nothing worked. SO i popped the XP disc back in and it doesn't even do anything! doesn't even attempt to install anything or even go to the blue screen, it just makes the screen go black.

SO...now I have the option of booting to a blank screen, booting with the XP CD in to a blank screen, booting from the vista dvd to a corrupt install, or leaving the computer turned off...I don't like any of those options, so i need to know what i can do to fix this.

A few things if needed, I am not running a raid configuration of any type, They are plugged in on sataII ports 1&2 ( I also tried 3&4), and....I guess that's all I have...

If you need any more info, just ask me. I really need help with this cause I'm out of options.

PS: When I attempt to run either HDD alone, without the other, I get an error saying it's missing..some type of file (i'm guessing from the missing HDD)...

HELP!

bump

thanks a lot man. i'm in class right now, but i'll give it a try when i get home.

Well, i don't get home from school until 4:30...so if anyone has any other suggestions, i'd love to have some backup advice. And it sux that I have to loose all my movies and game .iso images...cause i copied those to the new seagate.

BTW, that link you gave me is the one I followed word for word, I just had no luck. And maybe you can help me with something else? My WD 250Gb is still partitioned as (1) 0.0MB Partition (1) 198GB Parition and (1) 37GB Partition in that volume order. When I try to combine them in DiskPart using the PE 2.0 shortcut, it says "failed to extend parition" every time. I have tried every method I can think of. I have deleted all the partitions to unallocated space and tried it, made them all paritions and tried it, made some partitions and some unallocated space...everything. Also, in DiskPart, the 37GB partition is not there. It is only visible in Vista's list of partitions at the install screen. But when I try to combine them there, It does not let me through the "advanced" options.

...Is my 250GB HDD toast or what? it's only like 2 months old!

I added XPMCE to my existing Vista Install, it would not boot, so i booted from the Vista disc and tried to "repair my startup" which...it said it found an error and fixed it, but it didn't fix a darn thing. So, since i didn't wanna lose my files, i went to wal-mart and shelled out an overpriced amount of $ for a seagate ($100, it's $80 shipped from newegg) and installed XP on it so that I could save my files, then re-install vista on the other HDD.

But now, regardless of how many time I attempt it, Vista will not install properly on the old WD 250gig. So I guess (since I don't feel like spending even MORE money), I am going to just try to install vista on my seagate and lose my files ( really just about 50 Movies and a bunch of .ISO images for games like crysis...that I...downloaded...legaly...somehow... )...

If that works, I will then try to repair the partitions of the WD250 from within Vista. If anything, i'm just gonna use it as extra storage rather than booting XP, because I do NOT want to mess it up again.

PS: wat really sux is, i thought that switching to vista slowed down my Internet connection (went from downloading files at a steady 900kbps+ to a lowsy 100-200kbps), but when I booted up XP, I had the same problem, must be something else. So 3 days of headaches=for nothing...Vista has given me absolutely 0 problems so there is really no need for me to go to XP now...atleast now i can say for vista

alright, well thanks for all the help. and yea, vista does take getting used to. For the first couple days I would hit "START" and sit there for a second looking for where i needed to click...I felt stupid.

But other than that, it really has been great. The gaming performance hit is nothing when you have a good video card. I can play every game maxed out, so it's great. I can even play Crysis on ALL Very High settings at 1680x1050 as long as i leave the AA off. I can put it at 2X and it'a still playable, but there is no difference in looks at all so it's pointless...how did I get to bragging about how well my comp plays crysis?? lol, i'll let you know how the install goes. thanks again for all your help

Well, all's well. I ended up being able to "repair" the XP install, boot it up, move my files to the other HDD and install vista on the new seagate. so I am in Vista an typing right now.

thanks