DirecTV HDPC-20 Dual USB Tuner Shakes Hand with Vista

Shawn Cicoria — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 13:43:00 GMT

Finally, I can get my DirecTV signal down to Media Center without a whole bunch of crap.

I've been waiting for DirecTV's MC compatible capability for some time, this finally looks like I can get TiVo like function well integrated with MC.

Using TiVo now, but resistant to moving to the DirecTV DVR as it's interface just plain stinks.

Getting a winload.exe Missing or Corrupt after Cloning new drive...

Shawn Cicoria — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 13:31:33 GMT

Well, after upgrading the hard drive on my notebook to the Hitachi 200 Gig 7,200 drive, first thing is see is the message that Winload.exe is missing or Corrupt.

Turns out it's a simple fix and you can try two ways to fix. I was using Apricorn's Easy upgrade for SATA drives to make the clone. Great software good price and the USB external caddy now holds my old 2.5" SATA drive. One thing is they specifically state that it doesn't work with Vista - that's for the cloning software running "under" Vista. It still works to clone or image you just need the commands below to fix what turns out to be a minor issue - no data loss, just a bit of Vista Bootmanager confusion with their new boot process (no more boot.ini remember!!!)

Steps To Do

Once you have the new cloned drive in, using your Vista installation CD, boot from it then go through the prompts to "repair" you system and when there, choose "Command prompt".

At the command prompt, simply type the following (found in KB article 927391).

Bootrec /RebuildBcd <enter> - then, it should find your c:\windows installation and just select "Y". At that point you should be "bootable" and the message goes away.

Others have been reporting that the above isn't always working and have found an alternate way - which I also found up on the Hitachi site under their "Notebook PC Upgrade Kit Installation FAQs". The following is from that page - however, they're not specific "when" you do this. You can do it AFTER by booting from the Vista Installation CD, getting through to the Command Prompt and running the following commands.

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} osdevice boot

Later on, I also found this link that has a bit more discussion on dual booting, multi-booting, and cloning with Vista...

Dual/Multi Booting With Vista

Hardware

DirecTV HDPC-20 Dual USB Tuner Shakes Hand with Vista

Getting a winload.exe Missing or Corrupt after Cloning new drive...

Steps To Do