Inaccessible Boot Device aka My F'n day (and Hello Dr Dos, I never knew you were there)

M

M

Yesterday sucked because something that should be incredibly easy in .Net
apparently isn't but today has been worse due to the "Inaccessible Boot
Device" error on my Win2000 machine.

This is a win2000 professional using an AMD 850 on an ASUS A7V-133 board
with a somewhat recent (few months old) Maxtor 40 gig drive. I have not
changed anything nor installed a new motherboard (as this seems to be a
common cause) nor any service packs. I installed a new version of guitar pro
and uninstalled some older versions but that was actually two days ago.

This has been todays events,

Started to load the 4 win2k loader disks to get to the RC but upon loading
it hangs on "Setup is Starting Win2000". Not sure why

The Maxtor drive is divided into 2 partitions, #1 fat (or fat32 don't
recall) with win98se and 17 gig of space and #2 NTFS Winnt partition also
17 gig.

From 98 I attempted to load sysinternals NTFS for 98 driver that should of
allowed me to access my NTFS drive. This results in a BSOD while its
attempting to access the NTFS part.

Now this the fun part. I have this 98 SE disk that came from who knows where
and its a copy btw. I put that in and boot the machine.

On a side note, this machine has never been able to boot from the cd drive
since I built it a few years ago. It has a Plextor cd writer and I never
really cared about cd booting. So I put my 98 disk in and fire up the
machine, lo and behold it boots from the cd and loads some Dr Dos OS.

I've heard of Dr Dos but never used it until now. Using this, I am able to
fully navigate my machine including the NTFS partition?!??!?!

In fact, I used this to get to some NTOS dll's that the sysinternals utility
needed.

SO, where to now? I tried running chkdisk from dr dos but it said it didn't
have enough memory. Should I be looking for some sort of registry repair or
try replacing an ide drive in case that's corrupt?

Thanks for any help
 
Joined
Feb 17, 2007
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Here's what I would try first. (It won't hurt!)


Boot from a plan jane dos boot disk that has fdisk on it.

Once you reach a command prompt, type fdisk /mbr. This will reset the master boot record on your hard disk without destroying any data on the drives.

From what you described, it appears that your hard disk is fine (since you can read data from it with your Dr. DOS cd) but your system nolonger see's it as an active bootable device. This type of behavior can occur if your master boot record becomes corrupt or is overwriten.
Hope this helps.
 

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