XP stopped booting/setup CD cannot access my disks - - Please Help

[mrceolla]

One morning, XP stopped booting. NONE of the alternate boot options
work. The startup CD, even w/ loading 3rd party drivers, cannot
access my hard drives.

I have an Adaptec 1200a ATA RAID w/ 2x80gig drives raided together and
then partitioned into two 80 gig. I have XP booting from partition 2
and 2000 from partition 1. 2000 still boots just fine, and it'll see,
read, and write to the XP partition, but XP will crash once the kernel
starts doing it's thing. I'll see the XP splash screen w/ progress
bar for a few seconds, then a quick flash of blue, then the computer
reboots itself.

I video taped the flash of blue so I could pause it and see what the
error was and it's a 0x0000007B inaccessible boot device.

I copied essential files from the root of partition 2, which was my
system drive, to partition 1 and made partition 1 my system drive...to
see if that made any difference. Same thing, 2000 boots just fine, XP
doesn't even see my HD.

If I choose a bootup option that'll display the DOS looking text
commands, I will see a bunch of lines that look a bit like:

multi(0)disk(0)partition(1)=windows\system32\drivers\blah.blah

Not sure if that's exact, but you get the idea. The arc paths are
accurate, so that's not the problem, but I'm wondering if seeing this,
and getting to the XP kernel means that XP can see my hard drives for
at least a moment.

I just don't understand how 2000 can see everything just fine, but the
XP install and even the setup CD have NO access whatsoever to my HD.

Could this be a MBR or partition boot sector thing? That's what I'm
leaning towards, but I don't know exactly how to check it or fix it
w/o loosing my information. I don't want to give in and reformat just
yet...especially if that doesn't do any good or I see this problem
again. And ESPECIALLY since I can still get to 2000 and don't want to
loose that ability before I backup some things.

What could be causing this strange situation? How can I resolve it?
Please, any suggestion or instruction will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mike

 

[Franklin]

Mike,
I'm no expert, but have had a similar experience to
yours, quite recently.

Check in the MS Suport Centre for Xp, through the start
button, under multi boot, or dual boot and if I recall
correctly - you can't dual boot two sytems alike i.e. if
there both using same/similar o/s.

My guess is that you've got visibility from 2000 to Xp
because both systems use the same file protocol (NTF, or
FAT32),but no visibility from Xp to 2000 because 2000 is
an earlier development and maybe there are compatibility
issues at stake.

I have not yet tried this, but you may be able to get
round the problem using something like Power Quest's
Partition Magic, which enables you to split the root
file, giving a layer of isolation between the the two
conflicting systems and therefore some immunity against a
crash when in Xp.

If not, then Partition magic is a very handy tool for hot
partitioning of drives and file formats and is easier to
use than Fdisk!

Regards.

 

[mrceolla]

Thanks for the info. Franklin, but my dual boot to XP and 2000 worked
great or almost a year. Tricky to get it to work, but once it did, it
worked well.

The crash doesn't happen in XP...it happens before I get there. A few
seconds after the XP splash screen comes up, or if I use the /sos
switch in boot.ini, I crash a few seconds after the kernel screen
comes up and reports two processors. Then a flash of bsod
(0x0000007B).

It simply looses track of my disk, or never sees them in the first
place...all the while 2000 runs just like it always did, reading and
writing to all drives just fine.

When installing to a partition, does the OS write installation
specific info to the partition boot sector AND MBR. If either one or
both of them have been corrupted, is it possible that I could still
boot to 2000 while the corruption disables both the XP OS and the XP
setup CD?