0x000000e: A True Story

Prologue
Alright, so I've got Ubuntu, XP, and W7 all installed and the Ubuntu grub loader is the king of all of them. Well, was. A few days ago, I was trying to delete the Ubuntu partition to free up space since I never use it. I couldn't delete the main 65GB partition, but there was a smaller 4GB partition that I could delete. I thought twice about it and decided that it shouldn't to much harm at all, seeing as it was probably just a swap partition. That deleted, but then I couldn't extend my W7 partition. Fail. Anyway, as a side note, I had a 160GB SimpleTech external drive plugged into my computer.

Day 1: The Crash
I was talking on a Skype call with a few of my friends when I suddenly got BSOD'd. I laughed a bit, got somewhat annoyed, and noticed that the error mentioned the external drive. I didn't pay much attention to it, but when I restarted, the grub wouldn't load.
Panic ensures.
It gave me the grub rescue console; I tried a few commands, yet none of them worked. At this point, I was very annoyed and so I searched through my DVDs and CDs and found my Ubuntu 9.10 CD, booted up into the live session and searched until my eyes bled. I called my friend and he told me to reinstall Ubuntu, so I deleted the Ubuntu partition (It actually worked this time) and reinstalled, however it still gave me grub-rescue. I found out how to make the Windows bootloader king again using bootrec.exe and a W7 install disk, so I did that, but it still offered no consolation. There was a new error this time. "The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible". I was happy because I thought I could fix this (I've had it before), but I couldn't. I searched and searched, but none of the solutions worked. The next day I was busy and had no time to work on it.

Day 3: The Solution
Today is day 3. I've found a program that will hopefully work called easyBCD, however it's an in-OS program. I tried to install W7 on a small partition that I made, but the disk was corrupt (I also tried startup repair). I burned a new disk and that one presented more errors yet. I restarted, and just to my luck, I don't even see the boot screen anymore. It's just a blank black screen.

Help! I want to finish this today.

0x0E is a kernel exception. Upon BSODing, you may see a message like "KERNEL_MODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED" indicating hardware compatibility issues or hardware failures in general. You may wish to try updating drivers or updating your BIOS.

Another message that you may see is "PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA" indicating a memory failure. I used to get these all of the time, don't worry it's easily fixed by re-seating your RAM sticks.

So, can you get into windows?

If you can, you can just install Easy BCD like a regular program and then set your boot order.

No, I can't get into Windows. Sorry I didn't mention that. That's why I tried to install a copy of W7 onto a smaller partition. I'll try resetting my RAM sticks- which drivers exactly would I need to update?

I had a great deal of difficulty getting Windows to boot itself on its own after I removed a Linux distro that had been calling the shots with grub. I "recovered" Windows God only knows how many times and always it said it fixed everything, yet Windows never loaded.

Eventually what I had to do was boot into Paragon's recovery disc (although you can probably just do this from a live cd gparted) and make sure the Windows boot partition had a boot flag on (as in, set active). Linux had apparently set it inactive.

I don't know if that helps at all. I will tell you one thing, though... Paragon's Recovery Boot Disc has saved me from a lot of stress, sweat, and tears.

Hey guys, I just took out the RAM and put it back in and it's now telling me that it simply doesn't have a boot record. This is good. I'm burning a new Windows 7 DVD at the moment, so we'll see where we are after doing startup repair and bootrec.exe commands.

Thank God that I learned to backup regularly with a decent program, Macrium & Acronis has gotten me out of a couple of jams. Even the default Windows 7 Backup saved the day once for me, my problem with it was that it's too slow.

And the full version of Acronis has a recovery option at bootup.

If one is going to be making a lot of changes to the system, it's best to backup regularly. That way, you can start over where you left off at.

Cat

This is one reason why when I do screw around with a Linux distro I put it on a separate hard drive and change the hard drive boot first options in the motherboard BIOS.

That way I have no issues with incompatibility. Just takes about a 30-45 seconds in the BIOS to switch to a different hard drive and boot to the OS of my choosing.

That's a good idea. I have three hard drives in my PC and yet I am always cramming the OSs on the same drive, and paying the price later in time wasted.

BetaMan, I can reset your boot records for you if you have the time to come by. No need for a re-install. I have a bootable disk that lets me do it in about 30 seconds.