I deleted all partitions on 3 hard drives and formatted the system drive to install Vista. Installation went fine, but when I remove the Vista DVD I get an error 22 when GRUB is not found

I'm in process of zeroing all three drives but there's got to be an easier way. Re-writing the MBR and running /fixboot from the Vista DVD command prompt didn't seem to have any effect with the same
"Starting GRUB error 22" appearing.

Try running bootrec /fixmbr from the command prompt of your booted Vista disc. Worked for me getting rid of 'nix boot issues.

EDIT: Oops, I didn't notice that you have already formatted your discs when you posted and already tried the fixmbr. Perhaps bring the drives back to factory condition? Anyways, I hope this helps someone.

Thanks Algis, I'll remember that. Hehe...I'm probably not going to be able to access the disks at all after zeroing them, but I've got all the tools out that I may need, like my trusty Windows 98 startup disk and FDISK

Thing is after deleteing the other two partitions the Vista DVD command prompt couldn't see any but the one Vista was on and I think GRUB got into the MBR of one of those

Sorry Graham, I was editing my post whilst you posted. Be interesting to see how you resolve this. since I missed that much in your post, me thinks it's time to go to sleep.

Yeah I figured it would be useful to know. At least I realize now that I should have all the disks visible and partitioned before running /fixmbr

VistaBootPRO has the ability to reload the bootloader correct?

gries818 wrote:

VistaBootPRO has the ability to reload the bootloader correct?

I'll try that when I nix Kubuntu off my main system to re-order the OS's on it. I don't know that it will remove GRUB though, because even though I had killed the partitions Linux was on, Grub was still attempting to start. It looked to me like it was still in the boot sector of the system drive.

Zeroing and then low level formating from the command prompt using DiskPart on the Vista DVD sorted the MBR out though. Zeroing was probably not necessary.

I thought it had the ability to reload the Vista (or Standard) MBR. Perhaps I'm mistaken.

gries818 wrote:

I thought it had the ability to reload the Vista (or Standard) MBR. Perhaps I'm mistaken.

No it does nothing to the MBR. All it can do is reload the Vista bootloader (BCD) or the "earlier of versions of windows" bootloader (ntldr)

Grav!ty wrote:

gries818 wrote: I thought it had the ability to reload the Vista (or Standard) MBR. Perhaps I'm mistaken. No it does nothing to the MBR. All it can do is reload the Vista bootloader (BCD) or the "earlier of versions of windows" bootloader (ntldr)

Well I know you can do it from the Recovery Console - but that has already been suggested.