inaccessible_boot_device bsod on mobo replacement

narita

Junior Member
Aug 16, 2003
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I recently had an epox 8k7a motherboard die on me (wednesday night) due to what I believe was bad caps, but that is another issue. This happened outside of the end of the warranty by about two weeks. Instead of trying to get epox to fix it, I went and bought another board, the epox 8rda+.

Well, I received the board yesterday and now have been trying to work around a very annoying problem. I have an installation of windows 2000 (sp3) that I wish to keep. I don't want to reformat and reinstall windows again just due to getting a new motherboard.

Upon trying to boot up, the windows 2000 install is recognized and in the middle of the color windows bootup screen (with the progress gradiant going across the bottom of the screen) I get an 'inaccessible_boot_device' bsod with the error 'STOP: 0x0000007B (0xEB81B84c,0xC0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000)'

I've searched around quite a good amount through google and the like to find a resolution to his problem. It seems to be caused by (from http://www.jsiinc.com/subj/tip4900/rh4948.htm ) 'This error can occur if the registry entries and drivers for the mass storage controller hardware in the backup computer are not installed in Windows. '

So it seems like as this is a very new motherboard (this is the revision 2 of the 8rda+ as well), my windows 2000 installation does not have the required drivers.

I have also tried what was suggested here ( http://www.jsiinc.com/subm/tip6100/rh6157.htm ) which was to boot up the windows 2000 cd and try to repair the operating system install. I manually went through chkdsk and fixboot, though that did not help. Fixmbr warned that my install could be hosed if I ran it, so I did not. I did not have any Emergency Rescue Disks for the Windows 2000 CD Repair process so I went to a friend's house and made an emergency rescue disk from his install. It seems like you really have to make them from your own install (prior to it imploding upon itself) for it do any work, as it examined the hard drive and boot records and the like fine, but it was unable to replace about 99% of the files that it attempted to, starting after the first 2.

If someone knows exactly which highpoint ide controller is on the epox 8rda+ rev 2, (I found drivers for 'hpt372', 'hpt372n', and 'hpt374' all on the epox driver install cd and put them onto a floppy for loading but I don't know which corresponds to my board as it is not indicated in the manual. ) I would greatly appreciate the information. I tried loading these drivers by pressing f6 at the beginning of boot up of the win 2000 cd but I'm guessing that this will just install the drivers when you would install windows, which I am not capable of doing on my hard drive without reformatting which would involve a huge loss of data.

So basically, how can I get these drivers installed with their applicable registry entries onto my system so that I can rid it of the 'inaccessible_boot_device' problem? Would it be likely that I could put the boot drive in a friend's computer and then pop in the epox driver cd and install everything without having the same 'inaccessible_boot_device' problem? It seems like whenever you change motherboards with your boot drive the same bsod error occurs (from http://www.jsiinc.com/subm/tip6100/rh6157.htm ). Would I be able to manually install the drivers and edit the system registry of my boot disk while booted up in a friend's computer using his main system and just accessing my hard drive without running windows off of it? If so, how can I do this?

Thank you all very much in advance.
 

mechBgon

Super Moderator<br>Elite Member
Oct 31, 1999
30,699
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You might try booting from your Win2000 CD and at the first prompt, which asks if you want to repair or install, choose "install." After examining your hard drive, Win2000 Setup will point out the existing installation and ask if you want it repaired. This time, say "repair," and it will get Win2000 to boot, but you may find that none of your programs work any more. You could still move your important files and documents to another hard drive, or reinstall CD-burning software and save them to CD-R's, then do a fresh install of Win2000 and reinstall your software.

Hope that helps some... here's the AnandTech FAQ on the subject for more info: Helping Windows survive a motherboard upgrade Welcome to the Forums narita! :)
 

narita

Junior Member
Aug 16, 2003
10
0
0
The old install of windows 2000 was on a fat32 volume. I attempted to do what you said, however, installing a new version of windows 2000 would require me to reformat the volume, according to the installer.

Thanks for the link about how to survive a motherboard upgrade, however, as the motherboard died on me, I was not able to do anything like that...

However, I found an old 2.4gb wd that I'm installing windows 2000 on just so I can have a working machine. I'm going to try to clear out another hard drive backing it up and then clean install onto there. The problem is, will I be able to boot up this drive? If I can't regularly, will I have to do the f6 to install drivers while installing the motherboard route (the problem with that is that I'm not sure which high point drivers are relevan to my system)?
 

mechBgon

Super Moderator<br>Elite Member
Oct 31, 1999
30,699
1
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You should be able to install Win2000 on your 2.4GB drive, then shut down, plug in your main hard drive, boot up to the 2.4GB drive again, and salvage your data. After that, unplug the 2.4GB drive, do a clean installation on your main hard drive, then plug in the 2.4GB drive and pull your data back. If you have more than 1GB of important files, then the 2.4GB drive may run out of room, though :( Good luck!
 

narita

Junior Member
Aug 16, 2003
10
0
0
The installation is going well. It has rebooted into the gui installer at the moment. I have 2 other storage hard drives that I did not want to wipe which I will use to salvage the data from the old boot drive so that should not be a substantial problem at all, it will just be a major pain to get things back to normal as I guess that it is not possible for me to use my old install with this new motherboard easily at any degree at this point.