USB backup then boot failure

[KAHruzer]

I guess I missed the lesson on USB backups.

I took an old 4GB notebook HDD which had WinNT 4.0 sp3 installed
and formatted with NTFS (NT)
and hooked it up to an external USB drive pack attached to another notebook
having Win2K sp4 to do a backup.

That part went fine.
However, when I reattached the HDD to the original notebook, it
would no longer boot NT, giving me the BSOD w/07B "Boot_Device_Inaccessible"

I'm pretty sure this has happened to others, but a quick search didn't seem
to find anything. The sticky thread on switching storage controllers almost applied.

[Hard Disks] FAQ: Switching Storage Controllers w/o Reinstalling Windows
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/196922-32-switching-storage-controllers-reinstalling-windows

Can someone tell me where I went wrong and if there's a way out without reinstalling WinNT on the old drive?

Is this pretty typical of external USB drive attachments?

Thanks.

 

[SinxarKnights]

I took an old 4GB notebook HDD which had WinNT 4.0 sp3 installed
and formatted with NTFS (NT)

That appears to be the problem right there. You formatted it... If I am not mistaken NT cannot read NTFS filesystems. So... You reformatted the drive and the MBR program don't recognize the filesystem.

I need another IT person to confirm this but don't NT use the NFS filesystem - NOT NTFS?

 

[bobbknight]

If you formatted the drive as xp ntfs Windows nt 4 might have trouble reading it.
Windows NT4 uses ntfsv1.2
Windows xp uses ntfsv3.1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS

 

[KAHruzer]

Yeah, WinNT uses NTFS v1, W2K uses NTFS v2...but the drive was not reformatted, it was left just as it was.

The original 4GB HDD was formatted with NTFS v1 (NT4) and was a DOS/NT dual boot drive, so had two partitions, the first being DOS FAT, the second being NTFS v1. It still boots to DOS fine, just not NT after the above procedure. That is, removed from notebook, attached to another notebook via USB external device and backed up. The second notebook was running W2Ksp4 with an FAT32 formatted boot drive (i.e., NOT NTFS v2).

Seems to me that wouldn't affect the original format of the 4GB HDD.

W2K should read NTFS v1 drives fine, as it appeard to do just fine. The backup was completed successfully. But, when the 4GB HDD was then returned to the original notebook, it would no longer boot NT4sp3, instead providing BSOD error x07B "BOOT_DEVICE_INACCESSIBLE".

What is it about making the 4GB HDD a USB external device temporarily which caused this? Or, what did W2K do to the drive in the process?

Seems to me it should've been a clean deal all the way.

 

[SinxarKnights]

I have been searching like a madman and STILL haven't found anything that could really help you.

The only stuff I can find tells me to make a backup of the drive and reinstall NT. Then restore your backup.

You could try to use the W2k recovery console but apparently people have had no luck with that either.

I know that I know something about this problem but for the life of me I cannot find it in my textbooks. I will keep looking for a solution tho...

Sorry I couldn't be of more help to ya.

 

[KAHruzer]

Thanks for looking. Sounds like you tried.

Think I may have recalled something which did this.
When I was doing the backup, there was one folder on the USB drive which had general access restricted (my personal folder). So, I changed the rights to that folder so it could be backed up.

The thought occurred to me that in doing so, the security set by NT was then modified by W2K under the current boot configuration.

I suspect that this made it fail to boot in NT again.