INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE error

M

MPeti1

Active member
Joined
Feb 23, 2019
Posts
42
Hi!

For a few days I'm experiencing problems with starting my pc. I've spent a lot of time trying to fix it, but nothing works..

I have a fairly old pc from the age when nVidia made storage controllers whose official driver don't support SSD TRIM. The board is an Asrock N68-VS3 FX. What I remember is that before the problem appeared I've removed the nVidia storage driver. I did it because the original Microsoft driver (pciide.sys) which is compatible with my storage controller supports TRIM operations. I've done that previously without any problems, and a lot of others also, and I don't think this is the cause, it just happened a day or 2 before the problem started. I had a successful boot after that, and I've verified that my SSD was managed by pciide.sys storage controller driver. What I also remember that I had my 2nd (in lifetime and in a few days) time I got DRIVER POWER STATE FAILURE after waking from hibernation. I wanted to find out it's cause, but I didn't have any dumps about the crash for some reason. I found driver verifier in windows, and I've set it to verify all drivers. It requested me to reboot the pc to apply changes.

Now I have no idea why it still can't access the boot device.. I've run chkdsk, everything is fine. I've backed up, removed the main entry from, and rebuilt bcd. bcdedit seems to be showing correct settings. main fs drivers (pciide, ntfs, iscsi, nvstor (the nvidia storage controller)) are set to boot start. Even that the BSOD message is not the one that means driver verifier made the pc crash, it could be just suppressed by the seen message. I'm unable to boot in safe mode for the same reason as normal mode, so as far as I know I can't delete the verifier settings with the utility. I have a system restore point, but it fails to restore it. Also I've tried to repair the system with dism in a pc with internet, but it just stops at around 90% that it can't find a few things, and that I need to specify the source option, however the wuauserv and usosvc are running, and -LimitAccess wasn't specified

So to summarize, I think there are driver problems, but I don't have any logs to verify that even if I choose the advanced boot option to enable boot logging.

I have Windows 10 x64 (1809). I have no new or replaced hardware. Please understand that it's not possible to reinstall/reset/clean install the system. I would greatly appreciate if someone could help me, because now I wasn't able to do anything with my pc for 4 days...
 
Forgot to mention that I'm able to boot to the Recovery Evironment, and to browse and read files on the system partition
 
Hi MPeti1,

From the recovery environment you should be able to reset driver verifier.
 
Thanks for the reply. I know that I can start the utility from there, but does it access the same settings as in normal system? Because in WinRE the loaded registry hives are not the same as in normal system, and also it would be weird if that would be set for every installation on the pc
 
For info: The older W7 era drivers built in to W10 (Standard MS AHCI Serial ATA is the W7 name) support TRIM natively, changing to using them via Device Manager will reduce the 3rd party drivers loading by ~4 (better stability), any performance hit is likely to be negligible.
 
MPeti1 said:
Thanks for the reply. I know that I can start the utility from there, but does it access the same settings as in normal system? Because in WinRE the loaded registry hives are not the same as in normal system, and also it would be weird if that would be set for every installation on the pc
Click to expand...
I might have missed something (even though I read your post a few times), but you have more than 1 installed operating systems or am I misreading this?
 
satrow said:
For info: The older W7 era drivers built in to W10 (Standard MS AHCI Serial ATA is the W7 name) support TRIM natively, changing to using them via Device Manager will reduce the 3rd party drivers loading by ~4 (better stability), any performance hit is likely to be negligible.
Click to expand...

Thanks, but I already know that. This is why I have removed the nVidia storage controller drivers by updating it to the one you mentioned.
I've did that once, but when I updated to 1809 it was replaced again by the nVidia ones. I did that again on monday or tuesday, and it was working fine. I just mentioned it to make sure you know that happened, and I don't think this is the cause. But if it isn't, nor driver verifier, than I have absolutely no idea what's going on.
What I didn't mentioned is that I have a system restore point (from 1-2 hours before the erroneous reboot), but I can't restore that because of 0x81000204 (although the partition is not corrupted according to chkdsk)
 
axe0 said:
I might have missed something (even though I read your post a few times), but you have more than 1 installed operating systems or am I misreading this?
Click to expand...
Yes, I have 2. The second was last booted about 1,5 years ago, and it was planned to be "recycled" since that. I meant that in my understanding driver verifier (if it stores settings in registry) stores it's settings in one of the currently loaded reg hives. If this is the case, then running it in WinRE (the default recovery environment) would just set it's values there, but not in the main system, since it loads it's hives from a different place. I think that this is the case because otherwise driver verifier wouldn't even allow me to boot to that old system
 
I've tried that, but no change. The deleted keys didn't come back, but the bsod with the error code is still here.
 
jcgriff2 said:
P2 + P4 contains "secret" info that Microsoft won't release (they won't tell us what it is).

I an ot a hardware expert and don't quite understand what you've done with the SSD driver.

Did this not work? - Disable Driver Verifier Outside Windows (Vista / 7 / 8 / 10)

Regards. . .

jcgriff2
Click to expand...

Yes, that worked. I was able to delete the keys, and they didn't get created again.
What I did is I've opened Device Manager, opened the "Storage controllers" dropdown menu, and updated every driver here named "NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA-controller" to something like "Standard dual channel PCI IDE-controller" (my system is not English, so I don't know it's exact English name). This is the way to properly replace a driver of a device (given that the new driver I selected can control the device). I've did that once in the past without problems, and now it was ok when I rebooted after that, so I don't think that this caused the problem. But still, I don't know what did cause the problem.
 
@MPeti1

Just so I am crystal clear here - all you did was to run Driver Verifier; your system BSOD'd; then you could not re-boot because of the inaccessible boot device error. Correct?

If so, Driver Verifier seems to have flagged a boot driver. Go to c:\windows\minidump and see if there are any recent dumps there.

If there are, copy them to Desktop, zip them up and attach to your next post. Perm settings will prevent you from zipping in the \windows directory.

Regards. . .

jcgriff2

p.s. I am really lost about your drivers.
 
jcgriff2 said:
@MPeti1

Just so I am crystal clear here - all you did was to run Driver Verifier; your system BSOD'd; then you could not re-boot because of the inaccessible boot device error. Correct?

If so, Driver Verifier seems to have flagged a boot driver. Go to c:\windows\minidump and see if there are any recent dumps there.

If there are, copy them to Desktop, zip them up and attach to your next post. Perm settings will prevent you from zipping in the \windows directory.

Regards. . .

jcgriff2

p.s. I am really lost about your drivers.
Click to expand...

I'm don't remember exactly now, it was days ago. I remember that I've uninstalled epic games launcher (since I didn't use that), and I experienced that UWP apps (like the preinstalled Photos) wasn't able to start, even after resetting them in the Settings app. After that somehow I came to a point where I had run chkdsk on the system drive, and it found corruption in a few files, like UserClasses.dat (if I remember correctly). It wanted to reboot the machine to be able to fix the errors, and so I rebooted it. After that, the normal Windows 10 loading screen appeared (Windows logo, black background, progress circle), but before it would start chkdsk, it had thrown the mentioned BSOD. I don't remember if I did any other than these, but probably not.

The minidump folder is empty, and I think this is because it really can't access the system partition, so it can't write to it. This also may be the cause of why the boot logging is not working. But I just can't understand what could happen that made even safe mode unbootable, if the partition is perfectly readable/writable with the Recovery Environment's command prompt, and also from other PC's
 
I have an SSD as a system drive, not a HDD, but I've already tested it by Hard Disk Sentinel (full surface test, short and long drive self tests, all ended without problems). SMART data is also perfect
 
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Yes I did, why? I did the tests after the error occurred. And, there was a successful reboot after the driver was changed
 

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