Vista -i need Installation help

[BladeWolf]

I have joined the dark side

I have now in my possession a copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium.
I also now have a clean, completely formatted 640GB Hard Disk Drive.
Now, before i even to get to the install part i get this message. NTLDR is missing, press Ctrl-alt-del to restart. Now i have looked at the computerhope section for this problem, but it seems to have evolved.

Now for the sake of my sanity i will refer to my IDE ports as 1 and 2 (there are 5 but they all herald the same results as 2)

When i connect my HDD to port 1, my BIOS/CMOS can "see" that the hard drive is present, but for some reason cannot auto-detect or set as Primary Master.

When i attach it to slot 2, it cannot "see" that the drive is there, but it will forsome reason allow me to set it as the Primary Master.

Both of these herald the NTLDR missing result.

I am running a MSI P965 Neo Motherboard, the HDD is a Westen Digital 640GB SATA (WD640AAKSDTL)
Any Ideas?

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

If the HD is formatted, it should show an error.

Have you made sure the jumpers on the Hard Drive are set to Primary Master?

[BladeWolf]

I didnt get any jumper for it, its is set to Auto at the moment
Yes the HD is formatted, i didnt know about that, how do i fix this?

[patio]

What kind of drive is this and how was it formatted ? ?
If you get an NTLDR error i don't think the drive is empty...

[BladeWolf]

the HDD is a Westen Digital 640GB SATA (WD640AAKSDTL)

It was formatted by another PC in my house, it was a NTFS (non-quick) format from a NTFS computer.

[BladeWolf]

For a point of confirmation that has recently occurred to me.

A XP install was attempted until it was decided to change. The Drive was then re-formatted by another machine that was running XP, would that make any difference?

[patio]

I would run a full format on it.
Or use the WD tools from the CD that shipped with the drive to prepare it for an OS install...this will wipe any data on there.

[BladeWolf]

WD tools? do you mean the Hard Drive? no CD was shipped with it

[patio]

Then they are available at WD's site....Data Lifeguard Tools i believe.

[BladeWolf]

Sorry for dissappering.

I spent the last few hours at PC World DERBY, attempting to get some sense  out of them (and perhaps my money back) but during my encounter there i think i may have met the person who actually knows what they are doing.

another 45 minutes later and we had fixed it.

It seems the BIOS was lookign for the NTLDR even though i had for the second time formatted the Hard Drive, Cleaned it and all the other things that go into making it useable. I had set my Boot Priority to CDROM, this however had not worked. So after fumblng around i managed to get my boot priority set to my primary DVD-Drive. Now we started to get somewhere. we still got the NTLDR message but when the PXE boot sequence was changed (sorry cant remember the exact wording) IT jumped straight into the arms of Vista Home Premium.

Thank you for all your help guys, it pointed me into what was the right direction.

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

All right then. Glad you got it working again.

If you're happy, we're happy.