INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE on Windows 7 x64

NTDEV
1

Hi,

for reasons unknown i am facing a INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE on my Windows 7 x64 system. Its at the early booting stage e.g. when the windows 7 logo appears and the animation starts to move, then i suddenly run into a INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. I am not sure what lead to this, since i did not install any software or updates, nor did i change any hardware configuration or pull the plug without shuttong down. It suddenly appear. Currently i am not working on that system anymore (how should i). i run chkdsk with full repair options, but the drive seems to be clean, at least thats what chkdsk reported to me. But i do have a few questions still in mind: What if one of the essential driver files is missing or cant be read from the file system. Is it possible to get a INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE because of this? What else could cause this, except the descriptions in the windbg help file?

K.

2

This means “unable to mount SystemRoot”.

Can be due to faulty disk filter which fails reads/writes/necessary IOCTLs.

–
Maxim S. Shatskih
Windows DDK MVP
xxxxx@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com

wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> Hi,
>
> for reasons unknown i am facing a INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE on my Windows 7 x64 system. Its at the early booting stage e.g. when the windows 7 logo appears and the animation starts to move, then i suddenly run into a INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. I am not sure what lead to this, since i did not install any software or updates, nor did i change any hardware configuration or pull the plug without shuttong down. It suddenly appear. Currently i am not working on that system anymore (how should i). i run chkdsk with full repair options, but the drive seems to be clean, at least thats what chkdsk reported to me. But i do have a few questions still in mind: What if one of the essential driver files is missing or cant be read from the file system. Is it possible to get a INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE because of this? What else could cause this, except the descriptions in the windbg help file?
>
> K.
>

3

Have you by any chance changed your ATA controller mode from legacy to AHCI, in the BIOS?

4

@Alex - No, nothing, i did not change anything. It seem to appear from nowhere, really i am seriuos.

@ Maxim - This would assume that something went into the driver stack, but i did not change anything anywhere and i am not aware of any system changes made from some application. I tried to recover the system from system restore points, but even they all fail. The complete system either freezes up or i get that bugcheck again. At some point this looked like some “real” hardware cause, some bad controller or whatever fails to operate inside the drive, but then after accessing the drive from outside and doing a fully fledged chkdsk, i found out that the drive has no errors and works perfectly. I did a complete low level “read” on the whole storage without any problems. I can access the file system from outside using a live system or patch the drive to a external usb based controller and gain full access to the complete ntfs system. It only fails inside the live system. I already did a full memory, cpu and mainboard check with no fail results.

Is there anywhere a list with the drivers that are necessary to boot a minimum Windows 7. I wil try to mount the registry from outside and modify the registry to possibly exclude any dead/corrupted driver(s) on the file system from loading. Maybe a binary is dammaged in some way it prevents the os to load.

5

If you can boot it with a debugger connected, issue

!devnode 0 1

at the bugcheck. You’ll see which device lacks a driver or could not start, and the reason for not starting.