W2K Pro won't boot up completely!

I've had W2K Pro installed on my computer for 5 months now, and except for the fact that not all my old Win98 programs will run on it, I've been really enjoying it. That is, until about a week ago. That's when it got to the white screen with the Windows 2000 Professional logo. The blue loading bar goes all the way to the end, and the system hangs up right there! I've tried using the four W2K Setup disks, but to no avail. When I try to re-install W2K either from the setup disks or from the CD, the system freezes right after the part where it states "searching for previous windows ". Whenever I install an operating system, I always opt for the emergency startup disk, boot disk or whatever it may be called, just for this type of emergency. However, this version didn't call out for that option - only the four setup disks.
I'm sure there must be some way to recover from this without running fdisk from my Win98 boot disk which will erase everything on my hard drive. Hopefully, one of you can help me with this delimma. If I have to, I'll go ahead and run fdisk as a last resort.
Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

 

Check your BIOS to make sure the Hd it sees is the same one (size and all) that you have.

If so, boot from a floppy and get details about the Hd and make sure again that what you see is what you got.

If you are using NTFS, you will need some special software to see the drive contents. You can get a free one for read-only from www.sysinternals.com.

 

RE: W2K won't boot up completely!

The BIOS does show the Hd as it should. The only boot disk I have is a Win98, since W2K Pro doesn't give the option to create a boot disk on installation. Using the Win98 disk doesn't work because it creates a RAM drive replacing the main Hd. This prevents me from logging onto the original main Hd. I'm thinking that probably the best way to go about this is to install another Hd as the master, change the original one to a slave, install W2K to the new Hd, and see if I can read the original Hd. Do you think this may work?

Sorry - I first posted this as a "new thread" instead of a reply

 

I'm having the same problem of W2KPro not booting completely. Had a system failure that I was 'told' was a failed motherboard. Bought that, reseated all the cards & memory, connected the devices & then was told to get a more powerfull power supply - did that. Now that's all working but W2KPro won't start. It gets to the white starting screen with the progrees bar going 1/2 way across & comes to grinding halt. I've managed to start in safe mode & think I now have a disk i/o failure code 00008001.

last boot message is WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\iomdisksys

So now what steps do I have available to me?

I'd really like to be able to USE this thing after 1 month of fiddling with hardware errors.

 

Actual error is

Disk I/O error: Status=00008001

I've only found one occurence on the web at
http://www.jsiinc.com/SUBJ/tip4500/rh4506.htm
which referes to having a ZIP drive installed. Haven't got one of those attached. Origianl IDE HD installed as master on primary IDE.


Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

FIXED IT.

Turns out the internal ZIP drive neede to have a ZIP disk in it to remove the message. All is well.

Though I'd like to throttle the Iomega engineers. (LOL NOT!!!!!)

 

Thanks for the info, pilotgal8. Looks like your problem is solved, that's good! I can't even get my system to boot up in safe mode. Tried every mode available, but no go. I don't have a Zip drive on mine, so can't use that info, unfortunately.
I'm pretty much convinced that I'll just have to proceed like I mentioned in my last reply - install my other HD and make that the master and the old one the slave. Hopefully, I should be able to access the info off the old one then, and save what I need. Then I'll go ahead and reformat the old one and go from there.