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Innacessible Boot Device + Other Issues

  • 30-08-2004 8:16am
    #1
    tomED
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,452 ✭✭✭


    Ok very strange problem...... need help badly.
    The other day I received a PC from a friend the other day, it had windows 2000 on it. Basically whilst booting you get the blue screen of death with the error "Innaccessible Boot Device". He says that he changed nothing, and I can't even get into safe mode to check (same error).....

    I have tried to use the windows 2000 installation to fix the problem (without formating) but it wont install. I have tried the recovery console, but chkdsk says - "the volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems". The only thing Im short of doing is formating the drive, but I need to get files off it first (i can access the files when booting up in DOS).

    BUT NOW!! I'm even more concerned, another friend of mine contacted me with a similar problem (that same day) - except he was running windows XP and the error he got was unmountable bot device. When he was doing this he was trying to update form ME to XP.

    Cut a long story short on this one. I was able to format the drive, however each time I went through the XP setup it would tell me that it cant install XP as there was problems with the hard drive. I took the HD out, put it in another machine, used killdisk to wipe it clean and had no problems with it as a secodary drive on my other PC. I put it through its tests, did scandisk to check for errors etc - but there was nothing wrong with it.

    I then went to put it back into the other machine. Went through the setup - setup told me this time that it could not install xp on to the partition - i removed the partition - now it wont create a partition!!!!!!!!!

    Any ideas on any of these problems??? I have tried everything I know and still cant figure it out!!

    Thanks in advance for ANY thoughts!!!!

    Tom


Comments

  • #2
    seamus
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 68,317 ✭✭✭✭seamus


    I then went to put it back into the other machine. Went through the setup - setup told me this time that it could not install xp on to the partition - i removed the partition - now it wont create a partition!!!!!!!!!
    Sounds like a problem with the non-data area of the disc - the MBR and the partition table. I'm far from an officianado on hard disks, but afaik there is a separate non-data section on hard disks for storing this kind of thing. Have you tried a low-level format from the BIOS?
    BUT NOW!! I'm even more concerned, another friend of mine contacted me with a similar problem (that same day) - except he was running windows XP and the error he got was unmountable bot device. When he was doing this he was trying to update form ME to XP.
    Probably a different problem altogether. Did he encounter any problems during the install? That is, did it freeze, and he rebooted or something? Has he tried installing XP from scratch (yes, he should have backed up his data regardless :))?


  • #3
    tomED
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,452 ✭✭✭tomED


    seamus wrote:
    Sounds like a problem with the non-data area of the disc - the MBR and the partition table. I'm far from an officianado on hard disks, but afaik there is a separate non-data section on hard disks for storing this kind of thing. Have you tried a low-level format from the BIOS?
    I used the KillDisk utility (www.killdisk.com) is that the same thing????
    seamus wrote:
    Probably a different problem altogether. Did he encounter any problems during the install? That is, did it freeze, and he rebooted or something? Has he tried installing XP from scratch (yes, he should have backed up his data regardless :))?
    Yes it crashed whilst installing - i dont mind losin the data on this one - its the previous one that im worried about! :)

    Also tried reinstall as per first post - problems creating partitions etc.. thanks for the help!


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