I have a proprietary PC running Windows NT SP3 with 64MB RAM that is receiving the following error upon booting: INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE, STOP: 0x0000007B
The end users reported receiving disk errors. I attempted to run Scan Disk (several times), this found a few bad sectors, however it still reported disk errors. The original hard drive is a Western Digital Caviar 24300 (4.3GB). I thought it would be easier to ghost or clone the original drive as there are several applications/drivers that would take considerable time to find and or re-acquire. I had a Maxtor 91366U4 (~13GB?) I wanted to take its place. Ghost attempted to start however it was unable to complete as there were 'too many' bad sectors (I don't have the original error.). I then attempted to use Paragon Disk Manager Pro 9 and I received the following error: INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE, STOP: 0x0000007B when trying to boot after a successful disk copy. After further research I tried using a trial version of Casper to clone the drive with the same results. I then attempted to re-install the original drive so the users could work while I did further research, only to find the original drive is now getting the same error (INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE,
I know Windows is peculiar when dealing with 'large' disks. Is there any way to clone or ghost the original drive without getting this error?
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>> running Windows NT SP3 with 64MB RAM << is this correct ? seems not enough ram to me
the disks you are referring to "Western Digital Caviar 24300 (4.3GB). " and " Maxtor 91366U4 (~13GB?) " are NOT large disks.
i recommend testing the drive; it just seems bad
WD : http://support.wdc.com/dow
this can help to revive the drive too (did it myself a couple of weeks ago) : HDD regenerator : http://www.dposoft.net/
Did you try to recover the installation? Not sure if this will do you any good with this particular error, but seeing that you've gone this far and I thing oBdA is right, you're probably going to have to reload.
If you have the original installation media, then boot off the 3 diskettes. After the second is loaded you will be prompted with something like do a fresh install or repair an existing installation. Do the repair option and select to repair the boot partition, or MBR or whatever it was called. It can only fail on you!
I wouldn't try and repair the registry unless you've been running regular rdisk. You don't need a repair diskette if the repair function can read the volume and find and read the repair directory.
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by: oBdAPosted on 2009-01-08 at 02:11:17ID: 23323469
Apart from SP3 dating back to early stone age (and this can indeed cause problems with larger disks): if the original disk produces this error, then it's likely that the disk developed bad sectors that killed the boot files. In this case, no cloning software at all will help you any--if the original is broken, then the clones will obviously be broken as well.
Another possible problem is the age of the Service Pack; there was an issue where an NT4 pre-SP6 installation couldn't read an NTFS drive anymore once this drive had been mounted in an XP installation (for example in a machine with a parallel installation of NT4 and XP); can't find the article at the moment. Depending on the cloning software, this could have happened as well.
In principle, cloning the original disk should work, even with a larger disk, provided that the boot partition (assuming NTFS) is less than 7.8GB (4GB for pre-SP5) of size. Other partitions can basically have any size (well, assuming SP4 or ideally SP6a; SP3 might have some problems).
Windows NT Does Not Boot to a Partition That Starts More Than 4 GB into Disk
http://support.microsoft.c
You could try to boot the machine with a boot floppy:
How to Use a Windows Boot Disk to Prevent Boot Failure in Windows 2000 or Windows NT
http://support.microsoft.c
But if this works, I wouldn't put it back into production; clone and replace the defective drive immediately, instead of "wasting" its last accessible hours.
But in all likelihood, this installation can probably not be saved, you're probably up for a reinstall (either with a later OS, or, if it has to be NT4, I'd recommend putting it into a virtual machine instead of real hardware).