PC won't boot -- pls help!

[Phisherman]

I have an old Sony PC with a Promise hard drive controller, Maxtor
hard drive and another (old) hard drive. The promise drivers show
on-screen, but halfway through the Win 2000 Pro boot up process the
machine stops (blue screen of death) with

Inaccessible boot device. Use Chkdsk /f ...

I attempted to boot from a floppy or (Win 2000) CD, but that results
in a blank screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner. I
looked in the BIOS to make the boot order: removable devices, then
CD, then hard drive. The floppy I have contains the following hidden
files:

boot.ini
ntdetect.com
ntltr

I can access the BIOS. It shows the correct time and hardware
settings so I don't think the MoBo battery cell is bad. The primary
floppy is set to "Enable." One one floppy is in the PC.

I tried removing the Promise card, and attaching the hard drive
(jumper set to Master) directly to the MoBo Pri IDE connector.

I have another (working) Windows 2000 Pro PC to help with
troubleshooting.

How can I get this PC to boot from a floppy? What other things should
I test/suspect? Please help!

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I have an old Sony PC with a Promise hard drive controller, Maxtor
hard drive and another (old) hard drive. The promise drivers show
on-screen, but halfway through the Win 2000 Pro boot up process the
machine stops (blue screen of death) with

Inaccessible boot device. Use Chkdsk /f ...

I attempted to boot from a floppy or (Win 2000) CD, but that results
in a blank screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner. I
looked in the BIOS to make the boot order: removable devices, then
CD, then hard drive. The floppy I have contains the following hidden
files:

boot.ini
ntdetect.com
ntltr

I can access the BIOS. It shows the correct time and hardware
settings so I don't think the MoBo battery cell is bad. The primary
floppy is set to "Enable." One one floppy is in the PC.

I tried removing the Promise card, and attaching the hard drive
(jumper set to Master) directly to the MoBo Pri IDE connector.

I have another (working) Windows 2000 Pro PC to help with
troubleshooting.

How can I get this PC to boot from a floppy? What other things should
I test/suspect? Please help!

There is no point in attempting to boot from a floppy disk.
Doing so will bypass the very first steps in the boot process
but your problem occurs much, much later. Try booting into
Safe Mode. It would also be helpful to report the recent
history of the machine.

 

[Dave Patrick]

This article may help.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q155053/

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Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect

 

[Phisherman]

There is no point in attempting to boot from a floppy disk.
Doing so will bypass the very first steps in the boot process
but your problem occurs much, much later. Try booting into
Safe Mode. It would also be helpful to report the recent
history of the machine.

It won't boot to safe mode. It won't boot "from last known good
configuration." It won't boot from the CD nor the floppy. If a
critical file is missing or corrupt which I can't repair nor try
Chkdsk /f if I can't get a (DOS) prompt.
:-(

 

[The Kat]

It won't boot to safe mode. It won't boot "from last known good
configuration." It won't boot from the CD nor the floppy. If a
critical file is missing or corrupt which I can't repair nor try
Chkdsk /f if I can't get a (DOS) prompt.
:-(

If it won't boot from ANY device,
it's a pretty good bet your motherboard (and/or CPU) is hosed.




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[Phisherman]

If it won't boot from ANY device,
it's a pretty good bet your motherboard (and/or CPU) is hosed.

Windows 2000 is loading about halfway, then stops. If the MoBo or CPU
were bad it would not get to that point (isn't that correct?)

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Windows 2000 is loading about halfway, then stops. If the MoBo or CPU
were bad it would not get to that point (isn't that correct?)

Yes, this is entirely correct. It is very unlikely that you
have a hardware problem.

 

[Frank Booth Snr]

It won't boot to safe mode. It won't boot "from last known good
configuration." It won't boot from the CD nor the floppy. If a
critical file is missing or corrupt which I can't repair nor try
Chkdsk /f if I can't get a (DOS) prompt.
:-(

You need to go into bios and set the CD drive as the FIRST boot device
option. Then save bios settings and try booting from your Win2k CD
again. Make sure you see the 'boot from CDRom' option message then hit
<return>. It is only displayed for about a second. If you miss it, it
will fail to boot again.

 

[Phisherman]

You need to go into bios and set the CD drive as the FIRST boot device
option. Then save bios settings and try booting from your Win2k CD
again. Make sure you see the 'boot from CDRom' option message then hit
<return>. It is only displayed for about a second. If you miss it, it
will fail to boot again.

Thanks to all. I was finally able to boot from the Win 2000 CD after
removing a Promise (IDE controller) card. The original boot partition
is damaged but I was able to reload Win2k onto another physical drive.
The "bad" drive's data is accessible after making it a slave drive but
the booting from it (even in Safe Mode) is damaged.

 

[Jaime Rodríguez]

Hello.

I had that same issue a while ago and here's what i did and finally got away
with it.....

Connect that HD as slave into another W2K machine, as it boots chkdsk
utility will come out, let it run and perform chkdsk/f, with that, you
should be done and connect your HD again in its original pc and should work
great again.

If that fails, then get an app called "TUNEUP UTILITIES 2007" you can
download it in www.download.com and will let you try it for 30 days (all the
features) and go for Clean up and Repair then "TuneUp Disk Doctor" and
perform a throughout analysis.

You should be done with any of this utilities, if both fails, then, save
your important data from that HD and kiss him goodbye....

Hope this would help,

Jaime Rodríguez.