Help starting old win2k OS on new harddrive

Well, I never seem to have encountered this problem before, but then again, I'm not sure I've tried this that often using Win2k...

Anyway, my boss brought in his machine, which ended up having a dead ASUS A7V333...power surge. He decided he wanted to upgrade, so I picked him up an A7N8X deluxe.

Well everything goes fine, I install it, and boots right up.

Windows begins to load, but partway through the second startup screen, it bsod's saying it cannot locate the boot device. (HDD)

The odd part is, is that Windows see's the partition and install from the setup and repair program. I tried to repair it, having it check the boot and mbr, but no go.

The drive is a standard Maxtor D740XL, connected to the standard primary IDE. (So it's even still IDE-0)

The only main change is that this is now an nforce2 chipset, not a VIA cihpset.

Anyway, I can't boot off the drive, which is driving me nuts. I need to atleast boot to it to backup files.

I went ahead and told my boss I could just slave it in another system, back up whatever files he wants, and then wipe/reinstall. That's what I'd prefer to do...but he for some reason doesn't want me to.

He wants me to just install the mobo drivers and leave it as is, trusting it works.

He's probably just got files on there he doesn't want me to see...heheh.

Anyway...he's being kinda a pain about this, but more importantly, Windows is being a pain by not booting to the drive, just b/c of a new mobo.

What can I do????

Ok, I went through the recovery console and did chkdsk, fixboot, but not fixmbr. I don't want to mess up the partition...especially without a backup.

I'm at a loss of what to do, gonna tell my boss to either just let me back it up or bring in an A7V333 from home to get it running...

Well, I've figured out the problem, and looks like I *could* get it working if I loaded the drivers upon the setup's start. Problem is, there is no txtsetup.oem file for the nforce IDE. I'm still perplexed over this, considering I have full access to the drive in recovery console...

I'm telling my boss that I'll have to hook the hdd up to a similiar chipset to boot it and extract his data.

Sorry I didn't get a chance to answer quicker....

I've NEVER been able to replace the mobo and reboot into the old system. The BIOS change just doesn't sit well with w2k and I've tried about 15 times (each time I upgrade a mobo at work I give it a shot just to see).

You can replace the CPU and every other component int he box with virtually no problems, but if you swap mobo's yer' screwed. Do the alternative solution you had posted (similar chipset etc) and get the info he needs then wipe and reinstall.

This was the deciding factor that pushed me to partition each HD into two drives. I put the OS on C: then everything else on D: and tell all of my end users to save on D: or it might get lost. Even if the OS takes a huge dump I can do an install of w2k right over the old one and lose nothing on the D: drive.

Bosses, gotta love 'em. "I don't care if it's never been done, do it for me and have it finished by tomorrow."

Wedo

Wedo said:

Bosses, gotta love 'em. "I don't care if it's never been done, do it for me and have it finished by tomorrow."

Wedo

Click to expand...

Better then the boss that wants speed records broken.

" I know it takes 6 hours to do this, I want it done before you take lunch. By the way, its now 10 o'clock "

*slams head repeatedly against concrete*