Inaccessible boot disk after installing SP3 or SP4

[DocA]

Hi,

I just added a second hard drive to my pc, formatted it and installed W2K.
At this point, I had a working dual-boot system with W98 installed on C and
W2K on D. I could happily boot into either OS and W2K worked just fine.

Before installing any other software in W2K, I made an Emergency Repair
Disk.

Then I installed SP4 for W2K from a CD. The installation seemed to be
succesful and at the end a message suggested that I click FINISH to restart
the pc, which I did...

The pc restarted, and I selected to boot W2K from the list of OSs. The white
W2K startup screen appeared, but was shortly followed by a blue screen with
an error message explaining that there was an "inaccesible boot device".
Restarting did not solve the problem.

Any ideas what's happening?

Further info:
o Booting into Safe Mode gave the same error message
o I know that the SP4 CD is not corrupted because I have used it to install
SP4 succesfully on another PC
o I tried Repairing the W2K installation using the ERD. It didn't work.
o I tried running the SP4 uninstall.exe, but it wouldn't let me run it under
DOS
o I reformatted the drive and reinstalled W2K, which worked fine, but put me
back to square one
o I then tried installing SP3 instead of SP4. That didn't work either (same
inaccesible boot device message)
o The only thing out of the ordinary with my setup is that the second hard
drive is a 40Gb drive that I have limited to 32Gb using a capacity limiting
jumper. I had to do this because my BIOS does not recognize drives over
32Gb. But as this isn't a problem for W2K without service pack, I don't see
why W2K+service pack should be unhappy with it.

How can I install SP4 (or SP3)?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Adrian

 

[DocA]

SOLVED...I just found the reason in this article on the MS website, albeit
for SP1:

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 271274
"STOP 0x7B Error Message or Unformatted Partitions After You Apply Windows
2000 Service Pack 1"

The problem is indeed related to the use of a jumper to limit the hard drive
size.

I'm surprised that this problem never got fixed for later service packs, but
at least I know where I stand now.

Adrian

 

[Joe]

Check the boot.ini and make sure it's pointing to the
right drive.

Joe