While shutting down system, the power went out in the house. When I rebooted later I got the inaccessible boot device 0x7b. I switched out hard drives from a duplicate system, and got the same message from the clean HD. Is this the HD or is it some other hardware issue?

I forgot to say that I was able to boot WIN98SE fine on this system, and both WIN2K drives work on the other setup.

this happened to my pc, which is now the reason i have a APC Ups. I would definatly reccommend one and can save you lots of time/money in the event if a failiure, anwyays back to the question, During the shutdown process the system writes data to the page file for safe keeping, and starts to uninitialise drivers. If you have swapped the drives over i would check in the BIOS, can you boot up in Safe Mode? My drive went during a power trip, was a maxtor but i have never touched them since. This wiped the Primary IDE channel out, does the Hard Disk get recognized in the BIOS? even during POST? good luck and i hope this helps. p.s do you need a dual boot? its not reccommended

1. Hard drive from 'duplicate' system. How duplicate - eg, if it has a different mobo, you'd likely get a stop error trying to boot it in another machine. 2. I'd first try booting into recovery console and running chkdsk /p http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;229716 If that doesn't help, I'd rey a repair reinstall (keeps apps, settings, data, loses windows updates - so need to reapply service pack (unless install CD is SP4) and visit windows updates when complete: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;292175&Product=win2000