Windows 2000 does not boot up; reboot and select proper boot device or....

[Dat]

Every sinced this morning the computer would not boot and
after a few minutes displayed:

Reboot and Select proper Boot device
or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device

This just suddenly happens after a year of just using it
fine... help!

 

[Ken Simmons [MSFT]]

Hi Dat,

This message is coming from the system BIOS. Most likely the system is no
longer seeing the hard drive. I would first access the system ROM BIOS
setup and check to see if the hard drive is being detected. If it is, try
booting from you CD and boot to the Recovery Console and run Fixmbr and then
Fixboot. You can then enter "exit" to exit the Recovery Console and reboot.

Regards,

Ken Simmons

Microsoft Technical Support for Platforms and Business Applications

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Every sinced this morning the computer would not boot and
after a few minutes displayed:

Reboot and Select proper Boot device
or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device

This just suddenly happens after a year of just using it
fine... help!

You will have to do some trouble-shooting in order to find out
what's going on:

- Boot with a Win98 boot disk from www.bootdisk.com.
- Run fdisk.exe. What type of partitions do you see?
- Run fdisk.exe. Is your primary partition set to "active"?
- If your primary partition is NTFS, run this command:
ntfsdos /L:E. You can get ntfsdos.exe from www.sysinternals.com.
- Can you see any files and folders on drive C: (if FAT32) or on
drive E: (if NTFS)?

The next step may consist of booting the machine with your
Win2000 CD and attempting an automatic repair.

 

[John]

Ken,

I'm having a similar problem, but running Win2K Server
(see my post titled Reboot Problem at 2:52PM). The next
screen after entering Fixmbr is pretty scary: "CAUTION ...
FIXMBR may damage your partition tables if you proceed,
etc." Will your solution for Dat work on my OS with
mirrored HDD's?

John Stover

 

[John]

I'm no software expert, but perhaps my experience can help
you.

I had the same problem with my system today that you did
with yours, with the same error message at the same point
in the boot up process. I looked at my BIOS boot
sequence, and everything was correct, so I wasted half a
day trying to figure out how to fix the boot sector.
Along the way, I found that my BIOS clock had been reset
to 00:00 on 1 Jan 2000.

In re-checking my BIOS settings, I finally discovered that
although the boot sequence was correct (floppy, CD, HDD),
the order in which the BIOS looked for HDD's had also been
altered (from 0,1,2 to 2,0,1). Drive 2 is a network
storage HDD, with no boot sector on it. I changed the
order so that BIOS would try to boot from the correct HDD
(0), and my system booted up with no further problems.

I was having a problem with the system when I initially
rebooted, but when I rebooted I also had a Verizon DSL
installation CD in my D drive. I don't know if the BIOS
alterations were caused by the system problem, the
installation CD, or both, but I'll never reboot or startup
again with any CD in the boot sequence CD drive.

John Stover