a serious problem in need of serious help

[wpaschke]

Here's my situation. I have an ABIT KD7 motherboard and an Athlon XP 2400+ processor. I bought a 2600+ to upgrade a little. The computer did not like the 2600, even though it is supposed to support it. I attempted a flash bios update, and now the computer does not boot at all. No vido bios, no memory count, no error beep codes. The drives all get power, and that's where it stops.

I bought an ASUS A7N8X-X motherboard to try and get things back up and going again. The real problem I have is that the VIA KT400 IDE Drivers are installed in my Windows XP. The new board has the nVidia chipset now, and I get the "inaccessible boot device" blue screen. Is there a way I can get into my hard drive and remove the drivers from XP without having to reinstall the OS? Can something be done from the recovery console to remove the ide driver and get the machine to boot?

[Rob]

Have you contacted ASUS to see if they could help? What do you see before you get the inaccessible boot device error.

[wpaschke]

I'm pretty sure that ASUS is not going to help me with a "software" issue. I've played this game too many times in my life already.

The only message I get is the Microsoft "blue screen of death" that has the INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error message, and the machine begins a reboot immediately.

The real issue lies in removing the VIA chipset ide driver from windows. Once I can find out how to do that, I can get the machine to boot without a specific chipset and get into the OS to fix it.

[Rob]

Does the machine go through any of the startup process before you get the blue screen?

[wpaschke]

With the ASUS board? Yes, it does boot up normally. I'm trying to avoid having to re-load Windows XP Pro on top of itself. I've done that in the past and I'm trying to avoid having to lose some settings.

With the ABIT board? I get nothing. No video bios, no memory count, no CMOS, nothing. The drives spin up, and thats it.

[Rob]

Have you tried booting into safe mode?