inaccessible_boot_device

Question

help please...

we're running win 2000 server and everything has been great for months. today we noticed some slow screen redraws so we rebooted... and got a blue screen with a STOP: 0x0000007b inaccessible_boot_device message.

tried to use setup disks to run Repair (R) but as soon as setup enters prompts to start R, we get the following:

"Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer. Make sure any hard disk drives are powered on and properly connected to your computer, and that any disk related hardware configuration is correct. This may involve running a manufacturer-supplied diagnostic or setup program. Stup cannot continue. F3 to quit."

Nothing about the Hard drives on this box has been altered. It's a Poweredge 2500 using a SCSI raid 5, and while booting we can see that the controller starts successfully and sees the 2 containers (one is the boot drive) with their correct sizes... so that seems ok. We used F-10 to run the simple diagnostics, and that all went ok (no errors reported, all tests passed).

So why can't it boot, and how can we fix this ? We have a recent backup of the C: partition (in container 1) on tape, but how do we restore from tape if we can't boot, and if we have to restore one partition (C:) from tape, does that mean we will loose the data (same backed up to tape, some not) we have in our other partitions (D: & E: in container 2)?

any suggestions would be much appreciated....

Scooter47 · Answer

I just had this problem last week. I never figured out exactly what the cause of the problem was. After a whole day of troubleshooting I finally fixed it by doing a parallel install of win2k on the C: drive and then restoring the whole C: drive including active directory. All of our data was intact on the D: drive...I hope you have good backups :-)

DELL-Mark A · Answer

Hi, The 'Setup did not find any hard disk drives' message can be resolved by pressing F6 when prompted to load the Perc 3/di drivers. Win2000 does not have hese drivers native and they must be loaded by diskette. This is the latest version: PERC2, 2/Si, 3/Si, 3/Di, Driver, 2000, v. 2.7.1.4944, A12Filename: w2ka12dr.exe [211 KB] http://support.dell.com/us/en/filelib/download/index.asp?fileid=R47959

ChuckJolin · Answer

Mark,

I am working with a PowerEdge 6400, service tag CVK6W01. I originally recieved this "inaccessible_boot_device" in a blue screen after doing a routine reboot of the system. My systems boot partition is Raid 0.

I removed first one, then the other drives while trying to boot the system and now get an error message on startup that a logical drive has failed. The SCSI setup utility indicates that both of these drives are offline.

Since I don't get the message you indicated in your post, what would you suggest that I do?

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

inaccessible_boot_device

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