Solved Unable to boot as drive is inaccessable

[SanityAU]

I have a boot issue, I've looked online and found some people have had similar problems but I have been unable to find a resolution.

Specs:
ASUS P8P67
Intel i7-2600K
NVIDIA 570GTX (currently underclocked by 100mhz)
8GB RAM GSkill DDR3 @ 1600mhz
Antec TruePower 750W
*GSkill 120GB Phoenix Pro SSD
*Samsung 1.5TB SATA
*Seagate 3TB SATA
Windows 7 Pro - 64 bit

About 2 months ago, my GSkill SSD failed (or I thought it did), it went through phases of locking up and BSOD followed by "unable to boot as drive is inaccessable. Error 0xc000000e."

I sent the drive away, and got a new one last week and have since reinstalled all my old programs, etc. In the interim I bought a 3TB hard drive to use as a replacement (my 1.5TB is used for media/storage/etc).

I have been using my SSD problem free for the last week, so I thought I would format my 3TB to get some more storage space so I initially deleted it from the boot records then attempted to format it while windows is booted from my SSD, but it was unable to format.

I disconnected my 3TB to put into another machine to format, and upon reboot of my computer, the "unable to boot as drive is inaccessable" error appeared again, i disconnected my 1.5TB as well, and tried to boot again, same error. I reconnected my 3TB, and my computer booted no dramas.

Any ideas??

 

[bobafetthotmail]

Welcome to sevenforums.

Can you post a screenshot of your Disk Manager? I have a sneaking suspicion that the system reserved partition is still on the 3TB drive. That small hidden partition is necessary to boot windows 7. It's easy to fix, but I want some proofs before I send you doing stuff.

Write "disk manager" in the Start searchbox to find it quickly. Here tells how to post a screenshot.

 

[SanityAU]

Thanks for your prompt reply;

Here is the requested snippit. Disk drive D: is the 3TB drive

 

[SanityAU]

Is there some way it may be relying on files from another hard drive to boot? When I installed Win 7 on the SSD, none of the other drives were connected.

 

[bobafetthotmail]

Ok, so it is just an issue of Active partitions.

If you see, both the HDDs are marked as Active, when only the boot partition (C: in your case since you don't have that system reserved partition) should be marked as such. And yours isn't.

It's a bit more complex than anticipated.

From Disk Manager rightclick on C: partition and select "mark as active".

Open command prompt with administrative privileges, (this tutorial), then write
diskpart and press enter
list disk and press enter
select disk 1 (which is the 3 TB hard drive, you can see its number in Disk Manager) and press enter
list partition and press enter (t should list only one partition called Partition 1, the size as you see in disk manager)
select partition 1 and press enter
inactive and press enter.
now we do the same to the 1.5 TB disk
select disk 2 (which is the 1.5 TB hard drive) and press enter
list partition and press enter (t should list only one partition called Partition 1)
select partition 1 and press enter
inactive and press enter.

You should now see from Disk Manager that either of the two hard drives is no more marked as Active.

Then you reboot.
If it still fails booting this time (which would mean it is missing boot files as I was speculating above) you need to do a startup repair, this tutorial, and you should be good to go.

Btw, is there a reason to have more than 1 TB of unallocated space on your 3 TB hard drive? (so that in My Computer you see it as a 2 TB drive, not a 3 TB drive)

 

[SanityAU]

Thanks, I'm at work so I will give it a go when I get home.

What does making them inactive do?

It's sized to 2TB due to the MBR formatting, it wouldn't let me set the partition size greater than 2GB.

 

[bobafetthotmail]

What does making them inactive do?

Tells the BIOS that they don't contain boot files. The BIOS (the motherboard's firmware) does not have the smarts to find out this detail on its own.
So it won't try to boot from them and then giving errors like this guy here did experience.

Your issue was caused by C not being set as Active, but marking the other drives as inactive will avoid other issues in the future. They are data disks, not system disks, only system partition (or the system reserved partition if you have it) should be marked as active.

It's sized to 2TB due to the MBR formatting

I assume you did it to be able to boot it, as maybe your motherboard isn't able to boot a GPT disk. Anyway now that it is back to being a data disk, you can get it back to GPT by following this tutorial.

 

[SanityAU]

I have marked them both as inactive, I've noticed that the status of Disk 1 is "System, Primary Partition" and Disk 0 is "Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition", does it matter that Disk 0 is not "System" as well?

 

[bobafetthotmail]

I hope your C drive has been marked as active as well, as I said above.

That System in the wrong place may need you to do a startup repair up to three times as in this tutorial, in case when you reboot without D it fails to boot again. (do startup repair without D connected)
As that drive seems to still contain boot files or components of them anyway, and a startup repair is the fastest way to fix the issue.

Then after you got the SSD working fine on its own, you can connect the D drive again, reformat and rebuild the MBR to erase any possible trace that it was a system disk (to not confuse the BIOS). Moving that disk to GPT as in the tutorial above should do the trick without more command prompt magics.

 

[whs]

The problem seems to be simple. Your Disk0 (SSD) has no bootmgr. It is sitting either on Disk1 or Disk2. Leave those active and copy the bootmgr to C:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/209885-bootmgr-move-c-easybcd.html

The set Disk0 as first boot device in the BIOS.

 

[SanityAU]

The problem seems to be simple. Your Disk0 (SSD) has no bootmgr. It is sitting either on Disk1 or Disk2. Leave those active and copy the bootmgr to C:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/209885-bootmgr-move-c-easybcd.html

The set Disk0 as first boot device in the BIOS.

I disconnected the other harddrives, attempted to boot and sure enough "BOOTMGR not found". booted from cd and did a system repair and it's all good now.


Though the initial problem, why was it saying the disk was inaccessible?

 

[bobafetthotmail]

When you power up the PC you start a chain of programs finding and loading each other until the last loads Windows 7.
BIOS (the motherboard's firmware) goes and loads boot programs from a drive's MBR, that will then point to other boot programs inside a partition that will finally load the Operating system proper (windows 7).

This compartimentalization allows the hardware to be independent from the operating system.
This is complex but allows many benefits. You can easily install another operating system like Linux if you like, or do a multi-boot machine with 2 or more different operating systems on the same hard drive.
In case malware rapes and nukes your Windows 7 installation you just need to reinstall it, but the hardware cannot be damaged by it thanks to this compatimentalization.
For smartphones/tablets/whatever running Android and iOS it's not like that, there the operating system runs directly the hardware without any compartimentalization. Thus bad/buggy software can damage or destroy the hardware.

In your case one/more of the programs of this chain was on the HDD and not on the SSD, so without it one of the booting programs could not find the drive where the next step would have been.
Glad you fixed it.

 

[SanityAU]

Well I suppose that makes sense haha. It initially started happening spontaneously after a system lock-up. Thanks for all the help. + rep for all