Today my computer got destroyed by a virus beyond the abilities of AVG free to counter. the virus came from a flash drive that a friend borrowed. I connected another computer hard drive that was running vista to my pc, and put my crucial files on the other hard drive. after the transfer completed, I reinstalled windows XP on my hard drive without disconnecting the other hard drive. the installation seemed to work, but after I disconnected the other hard drive from my computer, I got this message when the computer restarted:
"Boot failure
press any key to continue"
pressing a button just made the message appear again a little lower on the screen. I put the other hard drive back in my computer, and when it started the computer booted xp with no problem. in the boot order menu, if I selected the hard drive that xp is installed on, I got the boot failure message. the vista hard drive still had all of its files on it. when I try to boot the vista drive by itself I get a message something like this:
"windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration Problem. Could not read for the selected boot disk. check boot path and disk hardware." then some stuff about windows hardware documentation and hardware reference manuals.
as far as I could tell the boot path was correct. I don't know much about BIOS and that kind of thing, but general problems I've usually been able to fix. any help would be appreciated. at this point the main goal is to get the vista computer working again. my (probably incorrect) theory is that the boot information of the two drives somehow got tangled together and are now inoperable separate from each other. that's a guess though. Help!
