Inaccessible Boot Device - Win2000sp4

my workstation was working fine and now i get this bluescreen. can't even boot into safemode. my antivirus is out of date and dont have a working subscription. can anyone help me out here? i checked the microsoft support pages and it said to run boot scan. any help is appreciated. thanks
-jarvis

 

What STOP are you getting?

 

okay JC,
well im getting the stop 0x0000007B (0X81880030,0xC0000032,0x00000000,0x00000000) Inaccessible_Boot_Device

what does that mean? thanks

 

OK....the error simply it means that it can not find a device to use to boot up. Generally the hard drive is the preferred boot device and your system can not access it. When your system powers up is there any indication that the hard drive is unaccessable during the Power On Tests? Try booting from your Windows CD. If that works, try repairing your Windows installation. If you can't access the hard drive, it may be dead.

 

yeah, the system 'sees' the hard drive, and attempts to boot off the disk. i can see the "Windows 2000" logo and progress bar .. it goes so far and then the blue screen shows. well im going to read on and find out what other options i can go. there are some files on the hd i need, then prob replace the hd. any other options? thanks ..

 

I believe my first choice would be booting from the Windows 2000 CD and doing a repair. That will replace all of your OS files but leaving your programs intact. If you perform the repair with a CD other than SP4 then you will have to apply SP4 to your system when you are done repairing.

Did this start happening after you installed something? Just curious.

 

no, i left system on over the weekend. when i came in on (last) monday it gave me the screen of death. anyhow, im in the recovery console now. im trying to copy some files to my zip drive. only that, the directory i want cant be copied. it says 'access is denied." i remember doing a repair long ago, now i gotta refresh ..

 

YEEHAAW!
i got it man! thanks for your help. i ran the repair, so now i just gotta update it all over again. after the updates, will i run the risk of this happening all over again - with the stop error? just wondering. thanks again!

 

Good luck!

I shouldn't think that you will get the error again, but I would get my anti-virus software updated and on-line again.

 

yeah,
well i appreciate your help. system seems okay now. thanks again bro.