Can't believe this hard drive problem is getting the better of me...

[DerProfi]

As a card-carrying PC geek, I can't believe this problem has taken me 3 days and counting...

My wife has a Compaq Armada M300 with a 12GB IBM Travelstar hard drive. It's running Windows 2000 with SP3, and the 12GB drive is configured as a single NTFS partition. She's running low on space, so I recently bought her a 40GB IBM/Hitachi Travelstar hard drive from GoogleGear, broke out my trusty Partition Magic boot disks, duplicated the entire NTFS partition onto the new drive, and installed the new drive.

On the first boot with the newly-imaged drive, all is well and Win2K rolls merrily along as if nothing had happened. If I shut down the machine and boot a second time, however, I get a blue screen:

*** STOP: 0x0000007B (0xEF04784C,0xC000000E,0x00000000,0x00000000)
INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

If this is the first time you've seen this Stop error screen,
restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow
these steps:

[etc. etc.]

If there's some boot device problem, what I don't understand is why I get the bluescreen on the 2nd boot but not the 1st. I've updated the computer's BIOS, tried many different disk imaging packages (DriveImage, DriveWizard, Ghost 2002, Ghost 2003, and PartitionMagic) and in every single case, I get the same error on the 2nd boot.

Anyone have some ideas?

 

[WarCon]

I found a bunch of articles at microsoft on the stop error that was generated, have you tried there?

From reading a few of those articles it seems to me that the problem may be whatever the OS is doing to adjust itself to a different size drive is taking place during the first boot and when you reboot the change causes the hang. You might try a proactive approach and delete the IDE controller or just the drive info from the device manager and make it refind it on the next boot (still might do it, but its worth a try). If that doesn't work, you could try using the drive limitation jumper and then re-image the drive so the OS doesn't have to do whatever it has to do to read over 32gig since it didn't have to before.

That model also use to have a problem with Hitachi drives, but I doubt the 40gig one is included in that issue.

 

[DerProfi]

Good suggestions! I'll give 'em a shot once wifey and her M300 are home from work tomorrow.

I checked Microsoft, but none of the articles listed seemed to apply 100%. If your ideas don't work out, I'll start trying to apply various fixes Microsoft suggests for related (but not identical) problems. One interesting symptom of this bluescreen is that it occurs when I'm booting normally and in safe mode. Never seen that happen before...

 

[WarCon]

Any update on the problem?