Inaccessible Boot Drive

July 12, 2004 9:02 PM

Windows tech support: Inaccessible Boot Drive. (more inside)

Fortune has bestowed me with a shiny used Dell Dimension 8100. One catch: It has Windows ME for its OS. No problem, I thought-- I'll swap out the ME HD, and replace it with the HD on my last machine, where Win2K happily resides.

I didn't need to adjust the jumpers, since I was going from a single HD setup to another single HD setup. So I powered it up, the status bar on the bottom filled up, and along came the Win2K splash page. So far so good, and then the stop error happened: Inaccessible Boot Device. The error is well-documented in Google, but the solutions are conflicting and often above my station. What can I do to make the PC boot off of the Win2k HD?

posted by trharlan to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Boot from the win2K CD and use the "Repair" option.
posted by cmonkey at 9:10 PM on July 12, 2004

I forgot to note that I do not have the Win2k CD.
posted by trharlan at 9:15 PM on July 12, 2004

Your "last machine" probably had a completely different configuration. If it won't come up in Safe Mode, you're pretty much screwed -- you'll be installing an OS from scratch. (Or attempting a repair operation).

Either way, you're going to need install media. After all, your boot drive doesn't work!
posted by majick at 9:20 PM on July 12, 2004

I'm pretty certain you'll need the W2K CD to get anywhere. Luckily, once you have that, you should be able to repair the install without losing any user data that's already on the drive.
posted by cmonkey at 9:35 PM on July 12, 2004

What I was just reading: Change Motherboard and save operating system. There's a whole section on the 'Inaccessible Boot Device' problem there, including a way to get it working without the Win2k CD (that's IBD Solution 2).
posted by boaz at 9:43 PM on July 12, 2004

Suck it up and reinstall Windows 2k. Download it if you previously owned it.
posted by Keyser Soze at 10:04 PM on July 12, 2004

Boaz!!!

IBD Solution #2 worked.

Bitchen. And thank you.
posted by trharlan at 10:49 PM on July 12, 2004

You're welcome. I went through almost the exact same thing just last week.

BTW, you can download 'optimized' drivers for any Dell PC by entering its service tag number at Dell's support website.
posted by boaz at 10:18 AM on July 13, 2004