Stop Error on Boot

[TamedTech]

Hi Ladies and Gents,

Working on a windows 2000 pro system for one of my customers. The system appeared to be working fine when we shut down at the end of the day.

On bootup the next morning during the loading screen for windows i get the "blue screen of death" informing me of a stop error 00x000007B - Unaccessable boot device.

I have done some research on this and followed most of the usual steps. It seems that nothing will recognise the hard drive ... apart from the BIOS ... which i have updated.

The system wont boot in safe mode ... nor will it boot using the last working configuration. If i put in the windows setup disk it will not recognise the hard drive.

Its a 4 year old laptop running a standard ATA drive so dont think its a driver issue.

My feeling is that the drive may be corrupt.

Any ideas are more than welcome.

cheers, Rob

 

[jimp56]

i concur that filesystem corruption is a good bet. try downloading an eval copy of "getdataback" and see if it can still recognize the file system.

did you try recovery console within the setup cdrom to see if it would read the drive there?

recovering the data can be a challenge since its a laptop drive -- in most cases its best if possible, to remove the drive and get a converter to allow it to be installed as a regular ide drive in a desktop pc, and run recovery software from desktop (or boot cdrom such as UBCD).

 

[TamedTech]

Thanks for that Jimp ... i did try to run the recovery tool from the windows boot CD-ROM and this wouldnt recofnise the hard drive iether.

The data from the hard drive is all backed-up ... and the laptop is of an age whereby we are willing to replace it. Just needed that second vote of confidence that it was likly to be data corruption.

Thanks again.

Rob

 

[wolluf]

Have you tried the drive manufacturer's diagnostic utility (they nearly all have free one on their site - the Hitachi one works with most other drive types too) to check the actual status of the drive?