Long story short – I had a Windows 2000 Server at the office with a pair of SCSI drives set up to mirror each other. I skipped a step when initially configuring the mirror so sadly I couldn’t boot from the mirror all too easily. That, and the drives themselves were old and slow.
SO – before the primary completely failed – I decided to switch to an IDE drive, of which I had several shiny new ones.
Problem was, that after moving from SCSI to IDE, I got that vile STOP 0x0000007B error (INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE) message. To the rescue came my buddy Mermaid with a handy little batchfile and slew of registry entries that would essentially reset the box to defaults so I could get it running on the IDE drive.
First I had to clone the data from the SCSI to the IDE with Norton Ghost. Once that was done, edit the registry on the IDE drive so it would load windows. Therein lies the rub, as getting to the registry involved either sticking it into another machine or accessing it via a pre-execution boot environment such as Bart’s PE which allows me to boot Windows from a CD.
So I edit the registry, reboot, nothing. Same error. I do a little searching and find this site which was the basis for the hack Mermaid provided. The problem was that it enabled a bunch of INTEL IDE controller drivers, since this was an AMD based system, it didn’t work.
I modified the registry entries replacing intelide with pciide and wouldn’t you know it – it worked.
For YEARS I have rebuilt systems when this sort of thing happened. Now that I know how it works, I won’t have to bother. I’ve got a shiny new motherboard, cpu, and ram combination for the server in question that can now be implemented in a matter of an hour or so instead of hours.
Thanks Mermaid for the assist – and I hope anyone who gets this error finds the little combination of info I’ve provided here helpful.
