8300 - Installed hard drive from 8250 Getting Inaccessible Boot Device Error

Question

I have a Dimension 8250 with Windows 2000 Prof.loaded on it and it works fine. I got a new 8300 and tried replacing it's hard drive with the hard drive from my 8250. Both hard drives are Western Digital WD300 drives, same part #... When I tried to boot the 8300 with the drive from the 8250 it goes through the windows starting ||||| and then the logo screen comes up for about 1 second and I get a Blue Screen Stop error that says Inaccessible Boot Device. This drive works fine in the 8250. I have tried putting another drive from a different 8250 that we have that had XP on it in the 8300 and it does the same thing. Any ideas? Is it something in the BIOS that I am over looking?

volcano11 · Answer

It might be that the drive is trying to load the chipset drivers for the 8250 motherboard on a system that has a completely different motherboard. Since the IDE controllers are part of the chipset, it gets totally confused when it can't find the right configuration on the wrong motherboard.

Steve

xperion2002 · Answer

Well, don know what motherboard 8250 is using.

But in regular, if u replace a HDD with OS already in it to another "new" motherboard, u have to reformat the HDD and install the OS again.

Other ways u can do is to:

Make a image (Ghost 2003 or whatever using) of the OS in old hdd, replace it with new one, format and run the image file in new HDD.

Stefan Finch · Answer

We have had many problems with the IDE Chipset on the 8300 series... From speaking to Dell I believe there may well be a design flaw. You can however reset the chipset with the following procedure.

F2 into the bios.

Press [ALT] - [F2] - - you should hear a bleep

Enable Caps Lock, Num Lock and Scroll Lock. Press [ALT] -

Save changes and exit.

The next reboot should find the new IDE Conifguration.

Hope this helps

S

Storage, Drives & Media

8300 - Installed hard drive from 8250 Getting Inaccessible Boot Device Error

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