Tuesday, December 30, 2003

INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

Bleh, my windows 2000 server won't come back up after a restart. Using a Promise SuperTrak SX6000 card in a RAID5 configuration. Prior to shutdown, a lot of services were hung and the System process was running a good bit of CPU. Gave it an hour and pulled the switch. Now when it boots up, it goes through the F8 text-mode status bar, flips to graphical status with the Win2000 logo and then blue screeens (BSOD) with "INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE".

Microsoft article: Stop 0x0000007B or INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

I am able to boot the setup CD and get to the Recovery Console command line. BOOT.INI file looks normal, all the files and folders seem to be intact (doing a quick DIR command).

Ran CHKDSK at the C:\ prompt (no arguments), after a bit, CHKDSK reports "found one ore more errors on the volume". So it's possible that disk corruption is causing the boot error.

Ran CHKDSK a second time (no arguments), volume reports as clean... so I ran it a third time with the "CHKDSK /P" option to force a re-check. Re-check reports clean, so I'm going to try a reboot and see if the system comes back up.

does his Peewee Herman happy-dance

System took a while to get up and running, sat at the graphical Win2000 screen for a long while (few minutes) before finally switching to the login screen. Lost my user profile on the machine, so every time I logged in, I got the default user profile again.

Encrypted files were hosed though... guess the encryption key was stored in the corrupted profile... so on top of numerous other issues that were piling on top, I grabbed a new snapshot of the data and then rebuilt the box. (Had to restore all EFS-protected files from backups.)

(now I get to start on rebuilding my WinXP game machine... something glitched the sound, no amount of removing / re-installing / swapping in other sound cards makes a difference... got SimCity4 Rush Hour expansion to play as well as Call of Duty sitting here taunting me... just wish I had the Antec case so I could kill two birds with one stone)

posted by Wuphon's at 6:03 PM