Yesterday I finally managed to upgrade from XP to Vista Ultimate after a few problems I encountered along the way. Today I decided to uninstall some programs that I no longer needed. So I first started uninstalling Corel Paint Shop Pro X. Halfway through the uninstallation process I got the BSOD and the system promptly rebooted itself. Except the system didn't boot up because I got the error message "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER". So I loaded my Vista DVD into the drive and pressed enter but the same error message came back. What can I do to resolve this?

It could be due to problems dealing with your hardware configuration or some drivers you don't have that you may not know you need. If you have an Intel chipset visit their website to see if they have Windows Vista drivers for your machine -- some RAID configurations or Intel chipsets require these drivers. Please post your system specs and there will be more information to try and help you.

Did you try doing an OS repair when booting with the Vista disc?

my Vista boot drive, a Maxtor 6L200M0, also failed unexpectedly. i installed the RC1 version on a 35Gb primary partition, leaving about 160Gb for my XP partition.
everything ran smoothly for about 2 months until when trying to install a MIDI keyboard it didn't appear to support. upon my attempt at booting Vista the next time at the OS selection screen it gave the error message 'BIOS does not be installed'.
i have tried to boot Vista but each time it searches for a boot drive and does not find one. from what i can see, booting from the partition is disabled as i can still access the data from my XP OS.
is there any way of 'enabling' the booting ability of the partition?

i have a limited knowledge of the advanced workings of hard drives and any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated! thanks

I got a Boot Failure after running System Restore to move it forward in time (I went back one step too far before that). But it corrected itself somehow or other. My PC is ancient stuff anyway...

By the way, System Restore is GREAT!

__________________
Resistance is Futile

I've had the same problem. However, the PC seems to boot when the Vista disk is in the DVD drive and set to boot before the HDD. As long as it asks me to 'Press a key to boot from CD or DVD', it'll then go on to boot. Tried various boot record repairs, none seemed to work.

Having the same problem too. Recently did a clean install of Vista business on a raid setup. Computer boots fine with install disk in drive, wont boot otherwise. Any help greatly appreciated

Same problem here. Used to work with the install disk in the drive. I think the problem is that Vista installs its bootloader in the mbr, which in my case is on my other hd (where I've installed WindowsXP). I've know disconnected this drive (to prevent Vista interferring with it), but now it doesn't boot at all. I'm going to spend a few more minutes on trying to find a solution for this (i.e. finding a way to have vista rewrite its loader on the mbr of the current hd), but I'm afraid I have to do a new clean install to get it all to work.

Hi I'm a new user here . Anyway, I'm aso having the same problem like you guys- can boot vista when the installation cd is in DVD-ROM. I'm using AMD athlon 64 with Asus A8N-SLI mobo. Are you guys using AMD processor or NForce4 chip mobo? I think we need to find the hardware similarity to find the solution 4 this prob. TQ

I was having the same problem of the Boot Disk Failure....(Only boot with Vista DVD). I have an IDE drive and a SATA drive. My Vista OS is in my SATA drive so I had my boot proroity set to SATA first. BUT for some reason if I change it so that the IDE boot first I wouldnt have that problem anymore.

Try it out to see if it help.

Ive had the same problem, not sure if you have the same setup but I have a sata raid array and a pata disk. I saw on another website that it Vista writes some boot config files to any pata disk seeing it as 0 in your set. I reinstalled with unplugging the pata drives and have had no problems since. Or like sKert suggested use the pata as 1st in the boot config.