Hello All! Is this a new one? My system will not boot (Can't find a boot partition) unless I have the Windows 7 DVD in the drive. It boots fine without the DVD if I uninstall the loader, and I tried all of them, and it behaves the same way with all loaders. It's Windows 7 Ultimate x64. I am running RAID 0 on my machine. I have a ZOTAC Motherboard. All the loaders say I have an "NVIDIA" Bios, which is not true, that's just the RAID BIOS, as my RAID controller is made by NVIDIA. I think what is happening is that the NVIDIA BIOS Loader is being replaced by the Win7 Boot loader, and hence it cant boot off the RAID array. But how to remedy? Any ideas? I have spent countless hours trying to figure this out and I can't. I'm normally pretty good with this stuff. Another way I can get around this is to boot into the DVD, run a repair on the Windows 7 Boot Process, which disables the windows loader and it's no longer activated. And just to clarify, it boots off the RAID array fine, if that Win7 DVD is in the drive. It reads something on that DVD and proceeds to boot properly off the RAID Array. As soon as I take that DVD out, stops right after POST. I have played with the boot order in the bios and tried everything single thing I can think of, still wont boot into Windows unless that DVD is in there. Crazy! Thanks, KGORCZYN
This sounds similar to a problem i had with an acer. I went into cmos and set cd drive as first boot and continued to install Vista. After everything was installed i set my loader and rebooted the machine (without the disk) and it would not load. I beat my head against the wall for hours before i realized i could hit F8 or F12 to get a boot menu. So i changed my first boot device back to hard drive booted to boot menu then selected cd drive. You are probably gonna have to reinstall due to this problem not installing the OS correctly.
Maybe you need to load a driver during setup to help Windows write the boot code to the MBR ? Don't know - just a thought. I'd forget about the Nvidia RAID - it's only software RAID - my ASUS board - 4 year old - has one that has become totally crazy so I don't use it anymore - it didn't provide much benefit at all and the risk of it crashing was not worth it. Now my X58 board with RAID is another story.