I have a reasonable amount of experience with these kinds of issues, but this one is just a little weird.
I'm trying to keep a legacy computer going that's attached to a piece of equipment that my department can't afford to replace, and which is still used on a regular basis. I was going to try to replace the whole box, but while the software for the instrument runs in Windows 7, it relies on a particular ARCnet PCI card for communication to the instrument and has the driver built into the software, and doesn't use the Windows driver system – which is something that works in Windows 2000 but not Windows 7. There's no driver for the card installed in the existing Win2K system, and the system only appears to activate the ARCnet card when the software is opened.
The computer is an IBM Netvista A40 – Pentium 3, Windows 2000, of course IDE drive interfaces. It's got the newest BIOS version that I found available. So for now I'm trying to replace the hard drive to dampen the terrifying noise of a Quantum Fireball LCT that's been spinning for 17 years. I picked up a 32 GB IDE SSD and used Ghost to clone the existing drive to it. For some reason BIOS sees the SSD as only 8 GB although software is able to see it as 32 GB but is only able to address 8 GB (so Ghost wouldn't let me create a 32 GB partition on it). That's fine – there's only 2 GB of data on the original system so 8 GB is plenty.
I get the "Inaccessible boot device" BSOD after booting from the SSD with normal boot. However, it works fine in Safe Mode. That's usually an indication that a few quick things will fix it. No other hardware has changed aside from the drive, so I didn't think I would run into driver issues. The drive is on the same channel as the original HDD, and is similarly set to master.
With a Windows 2000 CD I tried the "automatic" fixes (fixboot, etc.) as well as a repair install – neither of which was effective.
Any suggestions for things to try before I either attempt a Win2K clean install or give up on the SSD and get a newer IDE HDD?
I figure that there's maybe something strange with the way the IDE SSD reports geometry that causes the inability to address more than 8 GB of disk space – the existing HDD in there is larger than 8 GB (20 GB actually) and so it doesn't seem like the typical cases of BIOS limiting disk access. This system was from 2001 and would have been subject to the 137 GB BIOS disk limit, so this 8 GB thing seems like some edge case.
I thought about trying to see if virtualization with PCI card access might work, but I don't want to dump more time into this than is absolutely necessary.
