Can't boot Lat. C600 Win2000 HD on C610
 

The Dell Latitude C600 laptop series all take the same size hd, but when my c600 literally burned out I picked up a c610, the next in the series with new BIOS and hdware. Alas, the c610 hardware and BIOS refuses to recognize or adjust to my old Win2000 hd--STOP ...000000078 error message says something like ... inaccessible boot disk. I cannot go to CD Setup even though can get into DOS using old w98 ramdrive. Is there a program or a tip out there to get the w2000 running or, second choice, to at least wipe the disk? Much appreciated.

The problem you are running into that is causing the stop errors is the fact that the chipsets are different between the two motherboards. With that chipset difference, Windows is getting confused (it sends commands to the board, but doesn't get the responses it expects) and giving the STOP errors.

If you can boot to safe mode you should be able to load the correct chipset software for the C610, at which point you can restart and then load the drivers for the rest of the hardware. Unfortunately, I am not sure if that will work or not (it depends on exactly how far into startup Windows gets before it errors).

If you can boot to another device (CD, floppy, memory key) you can format the drive and it should then work fine in the C610. From what you describe, I suggest going into the BIOS (F2 at the Dell splash screen shortly after powering on) and double check the hard drive and/or optical drive (CD) are set as boot devices (some older BIOS settings do not have the CD set as a boot device by default).

If you have any other questions about this, or my suggestions, feel free to contact me at [email protected] (please add 'ATTN: Larry' to the subject to make sure it gets to me).

I hope this helps you get things working.


Larry
Dell Customer Advocate
[email protected]