I just wanted to post that if you restore a ghost image of a vista partition on to a blank hard drive, and you can't start up, The start up repair feature will not do the simple steps necessary to fix your problem. First, you need to write a new MBR by running from the command prompt on the install disc bootrec /fixmbr, then you need to mark the partition that has vista on it as active using the diskpart command. Took me hours to figure this out and only 5 minutes to fix it. It's a shame that the startup repair can't even detect that windows vista is installed on the computer if the MBR is missing or if the partition containing vista is not marked as active.

What if you tell Ghost to restore the MBR as one of the options you can choose when restoring an image ? You still probably have to mark the partition as active, but you might not have to do bootrec /fixmbr.

I was wondering if the instructions at symantec would have prevented this? I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you peanut.

Eh, who cares? My point is that the vista automatic startup repair function should detect that no partition is set as active and fix it, just like a 20 year old utility fdisk warns you asap that an active partition is not set.

By the way, even if you restore the MBR, no partition is set as active, so that wouldn't fix the problem anyway. I just hope maybe microsoft will see this and take 10 minutes to add this functionality in future releases.