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Stop Error After Connecting 2nd HD

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elderpav

Technical User
Apr 28, 2003
3
US
I have an HP Vectra VL with a 400mhz Pentium II. I have had Windows 2000 running on it without a problem for over a year. My original 6GB HD was full, so I bought a second hard drive, a Western Digital 80GB. I connected the new hard drive, set the jumpers, went into BIOS and set the old HD as Primary Master and the new HD as Primary Slave. I then powered up the system and got a Stop Error while Win2000 was trying to boot. The error message read: "STOP: 0X0000007B (0XEF01B84C, 0XC0000034, 0X00000000, 0X00000000) INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE". When I then disconnected the new HD and powered up again, Win2000 booted normally without problem. I checked the jumpers on both HDs, checked the BIOS, and everything appears correct. I also ran tests on the new HD and it appears fine. What's going on? I checked Microsoft's web site and it indicated it I might need to edit the boot.ini file. How do I do that? Any other ideas what the problem might be?
 
Not 100% sure on this, when you created the filesystem, did you make the large hard drive "active" .. if you did that may be why it's trying to boot from the other hard drive .. just a thought.
 
what tests did you run on new HD? For example, if you disconnect old drive and try booting with 2k install CD (as if to install 2k on new drive), does that work?

does the bios see the whole of this 80GB drive (ie, does it show as 80GB or about that on the POST screen when PC boots - because that age of PC may have a 32GB max drive size limitation - may need a bios upgrade, if one is available)?

Your boot.ini file should be fine - you don't (normally) have to do anything to it when adding a slave drive - it should look something like this:-

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

You are also sure you've got jumpers set correctly (some drives have different master settings for when there is or isn't a slave drive present)?
 
I'll attempt to answer you all at once. Thanks for your help guys!

Shmoes: I'm not sure if I made the large HD "active" or not. It's possible I did. Is there any way to check that or to change it to "inactive"?

wolluf:

Since the new HD is a Western Digital, I downloaded "Data Lifeguard Tools" from WD's website and ran it. It tested my new hard drive, correctly determined it was an 80GB drive, and determined there were no errors on the drive. I also went into Win2k Recovery Console and ran chkdsk /p and chkdsk /r which also showed no errors. I can see the entire contents of the new HD from the Recovery Console, can move around the directories, and it correctly reports the capacity of the new HD as being 80GB. I have tried disconnecting the old drive and booting with the Win2k install CD, and that works. I can even format the new HD and install Win2k on it. I just can't connect both drives and boot from the old drive.

When I'm in the BIOS setup screen, it shows the capacity of the new HD as being 65535MB. So the BIOS clearly isn't limited to 32GB - but I can't get it to show more than 65GB.

I'm pretty sure the jumpers are correct. I visited Quantum's website (maker of my old drive) and Western Digital's website and downloaded instructions on how to set the jumpers. Just to be sure, I've tried different jumper settings (including putting them both on Cable Select, which Hewlett Packard suggested) but nothing seems to work.
 
Did you check boot.ini looks like one I posted?

I can see from Google that some bioses have a 64GB limit - which it looks like yours has - though you say recovery console sees it as 80GB (though win2k also ignores bios - like you can set drive as NONE in the bios & win2k will still see it). Might be worth looking for bios update - though I can't really see why this would cause problem.

You could try a 2k 'boot floppy'. Copy ntldr, ntdetect.com & boot.ini to newly formatted floppy. Then boot machine from it (with both drives connected) - just to see if any different booting from hard drive (it should boot 2k on your old drive).

Other things to try - you say you can install 2k on new drive - what happens if you do this and swap them round (making new drive master).

Also - what happens if you connect new drive to secondary ide connector (old drive on its own on primary).

I'm presuming of course that your bios is set to boot from Hard drive one before hard drive two! (or C rather than D - depends on bios how its displayed).
 
if you run Fdisk is dos, it will have an "A" beside the active partition. I'm pretty sure it will only allow one at a time. so when you "SET ACTIVE" it will make one active and disable the other.


whatever you do .. don't delete any partitions ;)

 
Shmoes - you can have an active partition (just one) on each drive at the same time. But the boot sequence in the bios should determine where machine attempts to boot from (so if set to boot from 1st drive, an active partition on second drive SHOULD have no impact on the boot process, as long as there is an active partition on the first drive).
 
Hi Guys;

Sorry I haven't posted an update. I've been very busy. Here's what's up:

Somehow during the whole process of trying to fix this problem, the FAT on the new drive got trashed and the file structure on the new drive became inaccessible. So, I just reformatted the new drive and re-installed Win2k on it. At that point I figured, what the heck, let's just configure the system to boot from the new drive. So I reconfigured the BIOS and the jumpers so that the new drive is the Primary Master and the old drive is the Primary Slave. Lo and behold, it worked! Win2k booted and recognized both drives! So I think I'll just keep the setup that way. I lost a lot of data when I reformatted the new drive (I had backed up a lot of it, but not all), so now I'll have to spend a lot of time reinstalling software, drivers, etc. but at least the system is now working. Thanks a lot for all your help!
 
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