question
 

hi all,
just installed a new cpu, motherboard & ram into one of my PC's so I took the old components out and stuck them in another box.
The new one was an XP box, the one with the old components a 2k box. I made sure both hard drives were set to primary master however both boxes blue screened during boot displaying the message "inaccessible boot device"?
anyway i formatted them both now so its not a problem I was just wondering for future reference how to get around this/what not to do in future?
tia
liam

Re: question
 

Inaccessible boot device normally appears when you change disk controller (you see this in servers a lot when recovering backups across differing SCSI controllers) you can get around it but it means a lot of hacking device drivers and registry using something like "ERD Commander"

Re: question
 

There is a way of prepping the disk on the old system first, but that's just as much hassle.

Re: question
 

right so tricky what your saying is I -think-:
the motherboard contains the disk controller which because of the variation in manufacturer of the motherboards means they are different [controllers] which is why I get the error. Correct?

Re: question
 

the hard drives didnt like the change in hardware - there are ways to get round this such as removing various items from the registry and computer managment screen before turning off and swapping drives but its always best to do a format clean install.

Re: question
 

Have a look here:

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/inst...d/problems.htm

Re: question
 

If i understand your problem correctly, this will happen each time you change your chipset.

Very easy to solve, just run the repair tool on the W2k & WXP setup CD's. We get this issue daily in work.