The Lurker

Return of the INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

posted by ajf on 2003-01-31 at 07:37 pm

Here's an email I received a couple of days ago from Pete Holzmann about Q271965, the baffling INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error, also known as STOP 0x0000007B, after moving a Windows 2000 hard drive into a different computer:

Hi,

I have a small bit to add to your blog on the nefarious "can't move a Win2k/xp boot drive to new hardware" problem.

I gave up before getting it exactly right, but in retrospect I think I know what I would do next time (ie what I did wrong)

1) [I got this part right]

The recommended registry elements to be loaded all go into HKLM\SYSTEM\*

On a remotely-loaded hive (using the instructions you already link to), the remote hive is HKLM\test\*

2) [This part I quit too soon...]

The recommended registry elements all go into HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet

But on a remotely loaded hive, there IS no CurrentControlSet.

What I did: attempted to load into ControlSet001 (which looked pretty good as a match). It didn't work.

I should have then tried the other one that was present, ControlSet002. My guess (now) -- since I've moved to new hardware, it has a second ControlSet. In any case, it wouldn't have hurt to have tried. Oh well...

May the next person actually reach the Holy Grail of hardware portability in Windows :(

Oddly, at the time I'm writing this Q271965 doesn't appear to be available. There is another article about experiencing this problem with Windows XP, Q314082, which seems to confirm that Win2k users should refer to 271965, so I don't know what is going on.

Again, if anybody has more information which would be useful to others affected by this silly error, pass it along and I'll share it with those unfortunate enough to be directed here by Google.