Posted on 04/14/2007 10:58:28 AM PDT by raybbr
Oh boy! Here we go again.
Some of you may remember a couple of weeks ago I asked for help regarding installing a new hard drive.
With the help of several here I was able to get it up and running. I am not sure now, in light of my current predicament, whether it was running the way I thought it was.
I decided to upgrade my system with a new MB, RAM and CPU. I got an Athlon 64 3000, an MSI motherboard and 1G of ram.
The MB posted fine and I monitored the temps for about ten minutes before I tried to continue booting to Windows 2000 Pro (upgrade from 98SE.)
I let the machine boot and got the Windows Starting screen in black and white. Then it went to the Windows Starting screen with the little blue boxes on the bottom. I got about five of those blue boxes and then I got a blue screen saying that there was problem. I got an "Inaccesible Boot device" error. It wanted me to check my hard drives, check for viruses, etc.
I rebooted with the W2000 disk. I decided to let Windows repair the installation. It takes about ten minutes for Windows to load all the drivers, etc to continue with the installation. It got to the repair screen and when I told it to do the repair it would come back with a message that a start-up archive is missing.
I don't have a W2000 start-up disk just the install disk. I can't get either hd to repair W2000. I don't know if Windows can see the hd's anymore. I am at work and will be in and out of this thread.
Any suggestions or ideas will be greatly appreciated.
Ray
ping
Your “system files” are tied to your BIOS. When you changed motherboards, that changed. You may need to boot to the CD with Windows 2000, and reload the hard disk. This was not a project for a novice.
Exactly, it might have been wise to upgrade the OS while you were doing..
I've learned to jumper the master drive as master, the slave drive as slave, and try different drive cables until the bios correctly and instantly recognizes each drive. I keep both 40 and 80 conductor ribbon cables on hand and swap them until the drives work right.
If the bios can't read the drives correctly there will be a hang up during boot while the bios routines try to figure out what's connected on those IDE cables.
When I upgraded to 2.4 dual core, 1Gb RAM, and the 200GB hardrive, I cloned the orginal drive with Ghost and used it as my master while copying the clone on to the new HD (slave). Then I removed the original drive and put the cloned 200HD in the master slot. No problems yet. Of course, I have had the same OS since XP came out, which Im sure made the transistion easier..
it’s possible with a floppy that has fdisk on to do a FDISK /MBR
to rebuild the master boot record. I think Windows recovery also has an option to rewrite the MBR.
But that may not be sufficient... he’s probably looking at a total re-install.
ShadowAce,
I just wanted to ask a quick question unrelated to this, if that’s okay.
You know how CD-Rs hold 700MB of data and DVD-R’s hold 4.7GB?
Can’t I put a blank DVD-R in a CD burner and burn 4.7GB of files to it? Or do you actually need a DVD burner in order to burn to blank DVDs?
I swear that some guy in my neighborhood burns files to blank DVDs, even though he only has a CD burner, not a DVD burner.
Is that possible? Thanks for any suggestions/clarification.
I have tried that. It only goes so far and tells me that it can't find the hard drive. Yet the Bios correctly identifies the hard drives.
I have gotten to the point where the cd asks me if I want to repair "C:=\Windows" and I answer yes. Then it won't recognize the hard drive.
It shouldn't be this complex.
The machine boots up fine and even starts Windows. Then I get the Boot disk inaccessible error.
No, it’s not possible. CD burners and DVD burners use different steps in the laser motor. The DVD burner burns so much more because the laser step motor doesn’t go as far, and also because the media allows it. CD burners cannot burn DVDs—the drive won’t even recognize the media if inserted.
I have two seperate drives that have all the windows info on them. I don’t have a 2000 OEM disk just the upgrade version.
Some versions of the upgrade will merely ask if you have an install disk of Win98. If yours does not, then reinstall 98, then upgrade to 2000.
I'm not sure I understand this--can you clarify? Only one disk (your C:) disk should have the actual OS on it. The other probably contains data. If your second drive only contains your data and documents, then you don't need to back up this data before reinstalling Windows. Just don't format this second drive during installation. :)
I think the best thing to do is let the CD completely reformat the hard drive and reinstall cleanly.
A couple of weeks ago I installed a new Hd to take the place of the original. I had to remap the drives in W2K to get the sequence right. I created partitions and put the boot sector (or so I thought) on the new drive. I have been booting off of the new drive with the old one still installed. W2K wouldn’t boot without the old hard drive installed. I probably should have re-installed W2K to eliminate the second drive but I figured I would, at some point in the future, reformat it and use it for storage.
Once you've used Knoppix to backup the data files you want to keep, Knoppix also has a partition tool. It's called cfdisk, I think. Use that to remove all partitions from your system, then re-boot with your Win2000 or Win98 disk to perform a clean install.
Oh brother! I got it to boot using the old hardware. It asked to restart to finalize some changes. When it did it told me my old password had expired. I typed in the old pw and the new one which are the same, but now it won’t take the new pw. How in the heck do I get in?
Scratch that. I apparently didn’t type in a new pw. It was just blank.
Now I am up and running on the old hardware. With twist. The boot drive is now the old hard drive (40Gig) with it’s c: partition (5G) as the primary boot. The new drive which I was booting on has a 32Gig c: partition. For some reason it reverted back to booting on the original hard drive.
How can I make the new hd the boot drive and remove the old one?
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