dearleader

Sorry for the bump – I forgot about this thread, and wanted to try again after a few months. windows2, I made an ISO with HFSLIP and it also refuses to load setup. I do not want to use the F5 procedure and select Standard PC, because that is actually what disables all of my onboard devices. I think I’ve figured out the issue: this machine has an InsydeH2O BIOS, which is known to not play nice with Windows 2000. Some research tells me that the serial port settings could be the problem – however, I do not have these settings at all in my BIOS, and would need a mod to change them. The BIOS currently running is version F.35, revision 3.0 (search for "sp48079.exe" if you would like the image). Being from early 2008, this laptop is not on EFI.

I am trying to install Windows 2000 Professional SP4 on a Compaq Presario C700, dual-booting with its native Vista. During installation, the setup froze on the Setup is starting Windows 2000 screen, but I was able to get past it by selecting Standard PC as my HAL. It installed successfully, but none of the onboard devices work, i.e. the keyboard, touchpad, and so on - I had to use a USB keyboard to complete the installation and use the system. After installing Vista on a second partition, I get a 0×7B INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE BSOD, and the PC will no longer let me into Windows at all. What could be causing this issue, and how can I get my two installs to work properly and play nice with each other? Thank you!

I have already tried multiple original disc images from both Microsoft and Dell. I have set the timeout in my boot.ini to 0 and selected grub4dos as my default, which means I don't even need to use the boot menu. I think my problem is solved.

The floppy image workaround works! Thanks so much! In any case, this is my boot order (items without a number are disabled): 1. Diskette Drive 2. Internal HDD 3. USB Storage Device 4. CD/DVD/CD-RW Drive Modular Bay HDD Cardbus NIC D/Dock PCI slot NIC Onboard NIC

Could you explain #4 in more detail?

Yes, those bytes are 80 00 80 00.

The output of the cat command is 00 00 00 00 . Chainloading NTLDR as you described loads Windows fine, both with and without specifying --edx=0x0080 . Disk Management shows the disk as Disk 0.

These steps work. Could this mean that somewhere my drive is 0x81?

The re-mapping you just described works, even without the flash drive. Booting the entry for Windows XP directly still causes the ntoskrnl.exe issue. Both of the options you told me to add to my boot.ini fail with the following error: Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware. Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.

@Dietmar I have prepared the hard drive and re-installed Windows. The ntoskrnl.exe issue still occurs. @jaclaz The steps you described work, and I can get into Windows. Is there a way I can do this without relying on a boot disk?

@Dietmar I have prepared the flash drive with RMPrepUSB, and it just tells me that NTLDR is missing.

When I boot from the flash drive, I get a menu with the following options: 0 ...Back to Main Menu 1 Auto-detect and use F6 SATA/RAID/SCSI Driver 2 Auto-detect and use F6 SATA/RAID/SCSI Driver 3 First part of Windows XP Professional SP3 setup from partition 0 4 Second part of Windows XP Professional SP3 setup/Boot first internal disk I choose option 4, which loads Windows XP. Option 3 would start the installation again, and the other two are currently useless.

This is the output I get from these commands. grub> geometry (hd0) drive 0x80(LBA): C/H/S=7297/255/63, Sector Count/Size=117226305/512 Partition num: 0, active, Filesystem type is ntfs, partition type 0x07 grub> cat --hex --skip=446 (hd0)0+1 000001BE: 80 01 01 00 07 FE FE FF 3F 00 00 00 02 BB FC 06 ; Ç....■ ?....╗ⁿ. 000001CE: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ; ................ 000001DE: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ; ................ 000001EE: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ; ................ 000001FE: 55 AA ; U¬ grub> find --set-root /windows/system32/ntoskrnl.exe (hd0,0) grub> root (hd0,0) Filesystem type is ntfs, partition type 0x07 grub>

I have edited my boot.ini and both options are visible in the boot menu. The entry for Windows XP reads rdisk(0) as it should. Windows XP will still not boot, claiming that ntoskrnl.exe is missing or corrupt, but I can get to the grub> prompt.

That's what I did, and the issue persists.