I came home from college yesterday and decided for some reason to install windows 7 64bit that i had downloaded.  Having already tried out the BETA and RC1 (Release Candidate 1) i thought sure i may as well.  Already having Two versions of vista running 64bit and 32bit and well used to dual-booting windows what should have talking 40 mins ended up being a complete disaster and took much of the afternoon.

Having my main Vista installation installed on one of the many partitions on my hard drive, the drive letter being “F:”. I delete the C: drive partition and had planned to install Windows 7 over the C Drive.

For some unknown reason my PC was not letting me install Windows 7 or Vista. So when i rebooted back i got the message;

“BOOTMGR is missing
Press CTRL ALT DELETE to restart”

I kept getting the same setup error during the install process. “unable to create new system partition or locate a exsisting system partition”.

I tried everything to get windows back up and running, i still had a full working Vista isntallation sitting on one of the partition drives but i could not get to it for reasons i cant figure out.  Installation my main OS on a drive letter other than the C Drive was not good idea and this probably caused some of the problems. But the fact that i couldnt get any new Windows OS to install made things very difficult. Ive had this problem before and its got something to with the motherboard i have or the combination of SATA/IDE drives.

After about 6 hours of madness and throwing DVD’s into the PC including;

• An atempt to recover the c drive with Norton ghost 14
• Windows vista reinstall
  windows Vista Repair (which was the solution that is for the BOOTMGR is missing problem, which didnt work as Vista could not the see the Vista installtion i had).
• windows 7 install
• windows 7 Repair

Nothing worked, Vista Repair let me down big time and even my norton ghost which is usually very good at restoring backups wouldnt work.

So i picked up the motherboard manual and looked at the back of it to see if i had written down anything t hat might help and of course i did. “Disable the IDE Drives”. I did this and i got things working again.

There is something wrong with either the motherboard (The motherboard i have is a Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H), BIOS (latest version) or combination of SATA drives and IDE drives i have. I dont know what that problem is but im guessing its got something to with some settings in the BIOS. Im running my SATA Drives in IDE Native mode rather than i expect the better “AHCI Mode”.