{"id":33,"date":"2004-09-12T11:35:16","date_gmt":"2004-09-13T01:35:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.andrewjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=33"},"modified":"2004-09-12T11:35:16","modified_gmt":"2004-09-13T01:35:16","slug":"upgrade-woes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/2004\/09\/12\/upgrade-woes\/","title":{"rendered":"Upgrade Woes"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago I decided that it was really, really important that I spend a lump of money on upgrading my (home) desktop PC. After cautiously running the idea past Debra, who seemed surprisingly indifferent to such an important subject, I headed off to my favorite parts retainer<\/a> (with Debra and Matthew in tow) in search of a new CPU, motherboard, memory, and PSU.<\/p>\n

In the end I went for a 2.4GHz P4<\/a> with 1MB cache, a Gigabyte GA-8S655FXL<\/a>, two 512MB sticks of DDR memory and a generic 400W PSU. This looked like it would be somewhat of an improvement over my existing home-built 850MHz Athlon \/ Abit setup. After we had a nice lunch at the nearby Eighth Day cafe<\/a> I decided to prepare the system, removing any hardware drivers relating to the old mobo, but leave swapping the hardware until the following day. As things turned out, I needn’t have bothered – but I still managed to get it completely wrong.<\/p>\n

The next day, after removing an absurd amount of dust from the case, PSU, and boards, I got the hardware swapped-over. I should admit here that hardware makes me paranoid: I always<\/em> use an earthing bracelet and am absurdly careful not to touch anything that might be damaged by static. I also work very slowly, double checking all the time, so it took quite a while. Eventually, though, there was nothing left to do but turn it on and see what happened. I’m always struck at this point by the thought that if it doesn’t work then I have absolutely no idea how to find-out why<\/em>. Press the button… POST… Into the BIOS settings for a fiddle… Save and Exit? Yes… Windows 2000 starting… Then…<\/p>\n

\n

***STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF741B84C,0xC0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000)
<\/font><\/span>INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Damn. Powered it down and checked everything. Re-fitted the old board, which booted fine. Three hours flew by while I tried numerous of combinations of memory, chennels, devices, and settings – all with no success. It just didn’t make sense: everything looked fine. Finally, though, after a lot of googling I had the answer. If you’ve grown tired of this tale (and frankly, I have) then you can just skip to the answer is here<\/a>. Hopefully this will give it a little more Google-juice for anoyone else who has the same problem.<\/p>\n

The BSOD was happening because I’d forgotten to uninstall the disk controller driver. Win2K can cope with most hardware changes, but if it can’t access the boot disk then it doesn’t have much option but to give up. In this case, it was expecing to find the old motherboard’s VIA chipset drive controller, and got upset when it couldn’t. The solution was to install the old mobo one more time, install the “Standard Dual-Channel PCI IDE Controller” driver, and then install the new hardware. The system booted fine. Ironically, as I hinted earlier, all the other changes I’d made the previous day would have been handled automatically by the plug-and-play support, so I needn’t have bothered.<\/p>\n

So there you go. If you’re upgrading to a new motherboard, always uninstall the drive controller driver. Unless, of course, you really enjoy fitting motherboards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago I decided that it was really, really important that I spend a lump of money on upgrading my (home) desktop PC. After cautiously running the idea past Debra, who seemed surprisingly indifferent to such an important subject, I headed off to my favorite parts retainer (with Debra and Matthew in … Continue reading “Upgrade Woes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}