Help with..... INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

Ralthor

After swapping mobo...

Old mobo had 8 IDE channels current one has 4 IDE channels.

OS: Win2k pro.

P.s. I would prefer not to have to reinstall the OS... duh. :oP

Saruman

does this happen while loading windows or before it even starts? as in you get your post but where you would usaully get the "press f8 for safe mode" screen or OS select screen you get the error? If so you could boot off a boot disk and try fdisk /mbr

seamus

The message INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE certainly does imply it's not getting near the HD's boot sector. (I'm intrigued by 8 IDE channels on the previous mobo, btw) I'm assuming the 4 IDE channels are on two IDE cables, i.e. primary and secondary. Some BIOS's seem to be horribly uncustomisable, like mine, where if the HD isn't the primary master, it simply won't boot. Those american megatrend ones circa '95 were far superior.

If you haven't already, make sure, a thousand times, that the HDD with Win2k on it is the master on the primary IDE. Change your boot options, so it looks for the HDD first - if it's set to boot from floppy first and your floppy drive is shagged it might cause this problem. Otherwise, then attempt to boot from a Startup Floppy (you did make one didn't you? ) and check if it cans see your partitions, run fdisk to have a look if you have to. It really sounds like a hardware/Bios mistake/fault to me, tbh.

Saruman

you could be right Seamus but if i remember correctly you would get INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE on a blue screen.. but on thinking about it its not going to be the mbr.. i think it getting to boot sector but further..

possiblity.. was win2k installed on anything other than the primary partition? I know one thing you certainly would get this error in NT or 2000 (xp also) if you changed what partition/disk you were.. that ties into what seamus said.. IF for instance you had 2 hard disks, but when you changed the mbd you put them on a different order it would make no difference to windfows 98.. but windows 2000 is specific.. the boot.ini specifies what drive and what partition it expects windows to be located.. if its not there you will get the error.. find out and fix it! Either put them in the same order or edit your boot.ini to account for the changes

Saruman

oh another thing.. if you had 4 IDE slots on the old mbd (8 devices in total) then might it be a case that the hard drive/drives were on a raid controller (IDE raid that is) and you had a raid level of 0 or 1 setup and now your new one does not support it? I seriously doubt this is it so just do what i said previously.. Seamus.. what do you think.. i never deal with IDE raid only Raid 5 on servers... (sca drives)

Gerry

On setup win2k installs a default ide driver, which is based on your on board ide controller. (ie the first 2 channels, not including any raid channels)

If you move to a machine which has a different onboard controller, it won't work. I've come up against this numerous times.

Lets say you have 2 machines, both have the bx chipset, the first has an extra ide controller with 2 extra channels.

You install win2k on the first machine. Even if you are installing from the extra ide controller, win2k still picks up the onboard bx ide controller as well, so if you switch back to that at a later time, the machine will still boot.

Following from this, the hard drive will boot on the other motherboard, since it has the same onboard ide controller.

Your problem is that the 2 boards have different onboard ide controllers, and so you will have to reinstall.

amp

It's a complete whore so it is. It makes ghosting w2k very very annoying. And normally it's a full re-install too.