Well I spent this weekend (or a good part of it that wasn't involved in Mother's Day festivities) replacing motherboards in various machines around the house. (My old one, a Gigabit VAX7P w/ an Athlon 2100+ is going into my wife's machine, replacing a P2 400; my machine gets an ASUS K8N-E w/ an Athlon 64 Sempron 3400+). Got my new one in first. Basically accepted all the standard BIOS settings, then fired up Knoppix (the version that Greg so kindly sent out to those of us who asked).

Knoppix, in its infinite wisdom, found all my hard disks (which are NTFS-formatted), and prompty displayed their contents, and even tried to start WINE to execute some nominal Win16 program that didn't have a large registry presence (and actually did get it to start!). The only thing it didn't do was visibly recognize my wireless card (a D-Link 16 oh-somethin-or-nother) and wouldn't recognize my Micros~1 optical mouse when plugged into the USB port (although it did recognize it just fine when I plugged it into the PS-2 mouse port).

Emboldened by that, I decided to try to boot my existing installation of Windows (2000), expecting it to bitch about the fact that there was a bunch of new hardware, but to basically get over it and run. Not so fast, there Bunky...this is Micros~1 we're talking about! Here's the text from the BSOD that appeared after the boot-up graphic:

\nSTOP: 0x0000007B (0xF241B84C, 0xC0000004, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)\nINACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE\n\nIf this is the first time you've seen this Stop error screen, restart your \ncomputer.  If this screen appears again, follow these steps:\n\nCheck for viruses on you computer.  Remove any new hard drives or hard drive \ncontrollers.  Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly \nconfigured and terminated.  Run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption \nand then restart your computer.\n\nRefer to your Getting Started manual for more information on Stop errors.\n

Well, lessee, here. The computer won't boot, so checking for viruses is a non-starter. As is, for that matter, running CHKDSK. (Actually, if you start the basically useless Recovery Console, you can run a brain-damaged version of CHKDSK...that doesn't support the /F option, and requires some adjunct program (AUTOCHK.EXE, I think it was called) that doesn't exist on the hard drive or on the distribution disk...even though the CHKDSK help says it does! Fucking Morons!) Also, my hard drives are not new, and have been there all along. Now the ATA controller is different...like on the previous motherboard, it is an integral controller that I'm sure uses a different chipset. Not likely I'm going to "remove" it, however. Now as far as configuring a hard drive is concerned...I'm assuming here that they are talking about the BIOS settings. Like on the previous mobo, I basically let the system choose how to set up the hard drives. The only thing I explicitly set up was to disable the S.M.A.R.T. thinger..and it is disabled on the now mobo also. However, the new mobo..being new...seems to have a lot of new settings that the old one didn't have (or didn't support as options).

So does anybody out there have any idea what I might tweak to get my existing Win2K installation to recognize the boot disks? Note that it did display the Win2K logo, so it had to recognize the boot drive for some period of time before swallowing its virtual tongue. I really don't want to have to reinstall W2K, and then reinstall everything else in my machine.

Thanx in advance for any help

1) The goal is not to have to re-install the OS and everything else I own/use. Your fix doesn't address that problem...

2) As my machine is down, where am I going to apt-get debian from?

...Which I don't appear to have. But Thane's instructions are filed away for future use!

The problem is that the Recovery Console version of chkdsk doesn't support the /F option! There is this thing called fixboot, which is supposed to rewrite the boot sector of the disk. But that was, of course, ineffectual.

Looking at the rest of this thread, it seems that there may be a difference between choosing Recover before the install (and working your way down to the Manual Recover option heap) and selecting recover after selecting Install. Is this correct?

For the record, selecting Recover before the install option, then selecting either the Recovery Console, or the "other" option (don't remember its official name, but it eventually lead to the choice between "Fast Recover" and "Manual Recover") and doing the "Manual Recover" thing (which did eventually reinstall just about every DLL and EXE file associated with the system) was completely ineffective.

I did take another hard drive that I had previously put a version of W2K on, and reinstalled W2K on it from the CD on the machine with the new mobo. It seems to boot just fine, thank you. Which leads me to the following question: Could LBA be the culprit here? I don't recall how the old mobo BIOS was set up, but it's entirely possible that I had LBA turned off. On the current mobo, the BIOS has LBA set to Auto (which, according to the pamphlet manual for the mobo, means that LBA is used except for disks "not formatted for it".) Since these drives support it, and I haven't the slightest idea as to how one formats a disk for LBA (or against it, for that matter), it might be that Winduhs is trying to boot using it, but the disk doesn't know what the OS is talking about.

Of course, Knoppix can read (and write) these disks just fine. Which just goes to show: Linux is smarter than Windows. (But you already knew that....)