Vista no longer boots

[gimpy530]

OK, so I have a RAID 0 with 2 drives, and another separate drive for data. The data drive was giving me problems so I removed it, but now the system will not boot. With the data drive not connected Vista will begin to boot up, I see the splash screen, then the screen goes black and there is no disk activity.

I tried connecting the drive back up, but now at boot, at the screen that tells me what hard drives are present and which are RAID, it says next to the data drive "smart event".

So chances are my data drive is dead, oh well, it's under warranty and is backed up to my file server daily ( I <3 robocopy )

So anyway, why will this computer no longer boot? How can I get it to boot?

I already contacted Intel about the issue since nearly every other issue I've had on this system were caused by this motherboard, but I am not expecting Intel to be of much help....

CPU: Intel Q6600
Mobo: Intel DG33TL
Chipset: G33
OS: Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit

[AnnMarie]

Hi gimpy530. I have seen instances where the Vista Boot Manager was installed to another drive and Vista couldnt be loaded unless the drive was connected.

If this is your problem, see here for help.

[gimpy530]

OK, so before trying what you said I was trying to do a new image backup with bootable media, and the data drive was connected at the time.....after refusing to make a new backup to my external drive I took out the media and it rebooted.....as before it didn't boot up, but I could see and hear hard drived activity. After a while it was still doing that, and I could tell it was trying to use the data drive, so I unplugged the data cable for that drive while the computer was running, and guess what.....Vista booted

Yet again something that makes no sense to me....

Now it is booted, with the drive disconnected.....but I'm sort of afraid to reboot, since I have no idea if it will boot up again next time.

Anyway, I have a question. Knowing that with the data drive disconnected, Vista would begin to boot but not complete. With it able to begin booting, would it really be a bootloader issue? I would think that a bootloader issue would not let Vista even begin to boot, since it wouldn't know where Vista was. I'm not too familiar with Vista's bootloader, but taking what I know about others, I would think a bootloader problem would give different errors

[AnnMarie]

Yes, thinking about this a bit more, you would normally get a Windows Boot Manager error message. Your problem is beginning to sound as though it is hardware related rather than a Vista issue and this is not an area I have any expertise in. Hopefully someone else will jump in. Let me know if you want me to transfer your topic to the Hardware Forum.