I had the same problem with Windows XP after setting my two SATA drives to use RAID and mirror each other. Using the ideas on this post I notice my boot order included "Hard Disk" as one of the boot orders, but when I went to "Hard Disks" my external USB drive was set as number 1 in the order. I moved my RAID controller to number 1 and problem solved.

mine does the same thing...only boots off of a cd...did u find any way to fix it....

I just found a fix for this problem 5min ago. I was getting the same error and was determined to figure it out.. After re installing and getting the same error i looked in the bios. I have 2 hard drives, a 250GB SATA (Vista OS) and a 500GB SATA (Storage). I always plug my hard drives into the sata ports closest to the drive bays. Well turned out the 500GB Storage drive was in Sata port #3 and my 250GB OS hard drive was in SATA port #4. I hooked the 250gb HD into Sata port #1 re installed vista and walla. problem solved.

Kind of dumb really because XP doesn't have this issue.. but it worked for me.

This would explain my issue as well.

Main machine has 3 SATA drives, 36gb Raptor (System, Sata port 6), 320gb WD Cav (Dump, Sata port 4), 320gb Seagate (Dump, Sata port 2). Installed Vista x86 onto the Raptor, wont boot unless CD is in.

However, I have a second machine with 2 x IDE (120/200) and a Sata 250. Installed onto Primary IDE Master and it boots fine.

Gonna move my drives around when I get home tonight and test. Hoping this is the fix!

And yeah Scotty, XP doesnt have this issue. Bit of a pain :<

I have two hard drives in SATA, and one on secondary IDE slave.

Vista is installed on SATA 1, but setting it to boot the IDE drive first fixed it, for some strange reason.

Thanks for the fix!

Had the same problem and the guidance here pointed me in the correct direction.

My system had been working correctly for a month (Vista Home) and i tried an upgrade to ultimate. This failed and was rolled back.

Then a few days later my system would only boot as per the above - with cd in the drive.

Swapping the boot order on the two hard disks resolved the problem. From the postings and information that I have found this is only a problem for multiple disk machines.

Though I'm not sure how the boot record is moving!

Thanks for the fix guys. Like alot of other people here, switching IDE to first boot worked. Awsome job guys. Thanks again.

I have the same problem, however this is a new build, with an intel extreme 6850 cpu,asus striker extreme mobo, using windows vista 64 ultimate.
Everything loaded in nicely, I was in windows beginning to load the mobo drivers, gpu drivers, etc. It asked for a system restart, so I said yes, what did not realize is that windows was downloading it's updates, so before the system could reboot it had to download those , 47 of them to be exact, once it was done the system rebooted, went to a black screen with a cursor blinking in the top left corner, I figured it was still working, but half an hr went by and still nothing. SO I shut down the system and restarted it, everything seemed to be booting up nicely until it went to a black screen and said
disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter. I installed vista disk in my cd drive, and it would not read any of the drives. Starting to think windows vista has issues.

I cannot seem to boot my laptop. To begin, I partitioned my hard drive and some how, accidentally made the new partitioned drive active. When I rebooted my pc, it couldn't find the operating system. So, I used g-parted live and got access to my drives. I put the newly created partition back into the main drive (c drive), flag the c drive to boot, applied all actions, exited and restarted my pc. My pc gives me two options this time:
1. To use Start-Up Repair
2. To start Windows normally

I choose the first one and all I get is the little Microsoft icon, with the green bar running on and on forever. So, yet again, I restart my pc and choose to do start up repair. It acts like it will run it, but then I just get a black screen and it stays that way. I can't access anything. If someone has some advice I would greatly appreciate it, otherwise I'm just going to have to completely wipe my pc and I would prefer not to do that.

Thanks Skert & Gatman. fixed IDE as 1st boot, working fine now